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»AVII> RGHRER LEEPER 




Class It 



Book 






Copyright N° 



COrYMGHT DKl-'OBm 



THE AMERICAN IDEA 



"Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the 
suns." 



"Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were 
furl'd 
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world." 



THE AMERICAN 
IDEA 

Being a Short Study of the Tendency of Political 

History, with Special Reference to the 

Origin, Development, and Destiny of 

the Federal-Republican Polity 

of the United States 

By 

DAVID ROHRER LEEPER 

With Portrait 



CHICAGO 

PRESS OF RAND McNALLY & CO. 

1917 






CoPYBIGHT, 1917, BY 

S. LEEPER 



JUL 25 >9> 7 



RAND McNALLY & CO. 
Peintebs . . Chicago 



[70429 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

(By Hon. John B. Stoll, Veteran Newspaper Publisher and 

Editor; a Long Time Friend and Intimate of 

the Author) 



HP HE author of this work was recognized among 
his acquaintances as a man of exceptionally- 
large mental caliber, extraordinary capacity for 
profound thinking, and gifted with unusually 
strong reasoning powers. Had he been a man 
of less inherent modesty, more disposed to keep in 
the background than to hold the center of the 
stage, there is but little doubt that he could and 
would easily have won a commanding position in 
the councils of the nation. As a result of the 
application of well-directed persuasive powers by 
friends and admirers who were cognizant of his 
sterling qualities and his eminent fitness for pub- 
lic office, he did serve as a member of both houses 
of the Indiana General Assembly, as Mayor of 
the thriving city of South Bend, and later on as 
police commissioner of that municipality. Could 
he have been induced to countenance earnest 
entreaties for the acceptance of a congressional 
nomination, the nation would have had the 
benefit of his superior legislative capacity at 

[v] 



vi INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

Washington. Overtures to make him Governor 
of Indiana were at times both urgent and per- 
sistent. But he withstood pressure in these direc- 
tions with unshakable firmness. His love of 
literature and music, an irrepressible fondness for 
daily association with fellow-men in whom he had 
confidence and with whom he delighted to mingle, 
developed in his strong mind an unconquerable 
aversion to protracted severance of the ties of 
companionable fellowship. To devote himself to 
painstaking study, to the mastery of difficult 
problems, and to the production of some literary 
masterpiece, had seemingly become his supreme 
ambition. Thus actuated, and impelled by a 
laudable purpose to enable others to gain the 
benefit of his untiring study of governmental 
policies, he devoted himself assiduously to the 
preparation of the present work — The American 
Idea. Just how much time he devoted to its com- 
pilation, revision and final completion, he alone 
knew. Himself a thorough American, an earnest 
advocate of Right and Justice, and an uncompro- 
mising foe to sham and wrong, he rejoiced in the 
growth and development of The American Idea 
and freely gave himself over to the task of putting 
the thought in form for the convenience and 
benefit of his fellow-men. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE vii 

The great value of this work lies to a great 
extent in the concise form in which it presents to 
the thoughtful reader an insight into the views 
and conclusions of the greatest thinkers and most 
philosophical minds of the present and past cen- 
turies, forming as it does a vista of governmental 
construction and destruction from time immemo- 
rial and setting up guide-posts for the future of 
our own nation, would Ave survive and be supreme, 
so far as our own interests and necessities are 
concerned. 

To the analytical it is even more interesting 
than ordinarily to be found by study of political 
history, because it shows the mastery of mind 
that marked statesmanship in the past. In this 
practical age, when the occult is more humored 
than respected, it can well be wondered at that 
men of decades past should have been able to 
foresee and predict the very things that now hold 
the entire world in turmoil and torment, revising 
governments and territorial lines, turning autoc- 
racies into Republics, and converting monarchs 
into common citizens. That these prophecies 
could have been so accurately made should give 
a better understanding of the clear reasoning 
faculty and thinking power that made it pos- 
sible for the builders of the American Republic 



viii INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

to create a form of government that has survived 
for more than a century, gaining strength with 
each generation that has enjoyed the benefit of 
its splendid service. 

David Rohrer Leeper died Nov. 27, 1900, at 
the old Leeper homestead bordering on South 
Bend. The illness which proved his last, to a 
giant, rugged, courageous man who had under- 
gone all the hardships of early pioneer life and 
crossed the plains with the Argonauts of '49 in 
the rush to the California gold fields, at the outset 
seemed trivial and hardly of serious import. But 
the relentless battler won, and quietly, in per- 
fect harmony with his chosen habits of life, the 
vanquished passed beyond into the great un- 
known world — a severe loss to his family and 
intimates; a far greater loss to the culture and 
ennobling spirit of community life. The manu- 
script of The American Idea has been the cher- 
ished heritage of his surviving brother, Samuel 
Leeper, who, appreciating its value to those 
truly interested and concerned in the future of 
their country — native or adopted as may be, — 
has happily given consent to its publication. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I The Genesis of Popular Power ... 21 

II Politics and Religion 27 

III Anglo-Saxon Progressiveness — Decline of 

Democratic Utopianism 43 

IV Saxon or Slav — Liberty or Despotism . . 53 
V The Outlook as to Dangers from Within 71 

VI Politics and Morality 93 

VII The People and Self-Government . . 115 
VIII The Principle of Individuality . . . 137 
IX Population and Subsistence . . . . 151 
X Several Leading Features of the Ameri- 
can Polity Considered 163 

XI The Anglo-Saxon and Manifest Destiny 195 



[ix] 



PREFACE 

xjovelty or originality has not been specially 
sought after as a feature of the present 
little volume. The aim throughout has been 
simply to present in a form as compact, con- 
venient, and intelligible as possible what has 
appeared to me to be the most generally ac- 
cepted facts and theories current on the several 
topics considered. To this end, a much more 
extensive list of authorities has been examined 
than would appear from the meagre results 
shown ; and no scruple or hesitation has been felt 
in drawing literally and at length from such 
sources whenever it has been thought that the 
purpose in hand could be best subserved by so 
doing. In this way, the ablest specialists have 
been brought directly and forcefully to aid in 
the elucidation of the different phases of the 
subject investigated. The labor set apart for 
myself has been chiefly to select and collate the 
materials thus gleaned from rather numerous 
and widely scattered sources, and to endeavor 
to put these together into a readable, consistent, 

[xi] 



xii PREFACE 

and perspicuous whole. How far I have fallen 
short in the undertaking, I am sure that no one 
can more fully realize than myself. As to the 
spirit in which the work is conceived, it borders 
on neither extreme. If I have apprehended the 
import of the phenomena dealt with aright, the 
preponderance of facts, in spite of what may 
appear to the contrary, points to the conclusion 
that the tendency of man and of society is, 
upon the whole, not backward but forward; and 
that, with respect to popular government as 
illustrated in "The American Idea," we have 
equally good reason to look with satisfaction 
upon the present, and to cherish a hopeful view 
as to the future. 

D. R. L. 

South Bend, Ind. 



A PARTIAL LIST OF AUTHORITIES 

CONSULTED IN THE PREPARATION OF THIS VOLUME 



Amos, Science of Law. 

Fifty Years of the English Constitution. 

Science of Politics. 
Aristotle, Ethics. 

Politics and Economies. 
Arnold, Civilization in the United States. 
Atkinson, Distribution of Products. 
Badeau, A., Aristocracy in England. 
Bagehot, Physics and Politics. 

The English Constitution. 
Bancroft, History of the United States. 

History of the Constitution. 

Memorial Address, Life and Character of Abraham 
Lincoln. 
Bancroft, H. H., History of Utah. 
Bartlett, Life of Lincoln. 
Bellamy, Looking Backward. 
Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation. 
Bliss, On Sovereignty. 
Bourinot, Constitution of Canada. 
Brown, Studies in Modern Socialism. 
Bryce, The American Commonwealth. 
Buckle, History of Civilization in England. 
Carnegie, Triumphant Democracy. 

[ xiii ] 



xiv PARTIAL LIST OF AUTHORITIES 

Cooley, Constitutional Limitations. 

Principles of Constitutional Law. 
Curry, Constitutional Government in Spain. 
Curtis, G. T., History of the Constitution of the United 

States. 
Curtis, W. E., Land of the Nihilist. 
De Tocqueville, Democracy in America. 
Draper, Civil Policy of America. 

The Intellectual Development of Europe. 
Fiske, American Political Ideas. 

The Beginnings of New England. 

The Critical Period of American History. 
FoulJce, Slav or Saxon. 
Freeman, Comparative Politics. 

English People in Its Three Homes. 

Growth of the English Constitution. 

Impressions of the United States. 
Frothingham, Rise of the Republic of the United States. 
Froude, Oceana. 

Short Studies on Great Subjects. 

The English in the West Indies. 
George, Progress and Poverty. 

Protection and Free Trade. 

Social Problems. 
Gibbon, Roman Empire. 
Giffin, Progress of the Working Classes. 
Green, History of the English People. 
Griffin, The Great Republic. 
Grote, History of Greece. 
Guizot, History of Civilization. 

History of Representative Government. 



PARTIAL LIST OF AUTHORITIES xv 

Gunton, Wealth and Progress. 

Haeckel, History of Creation. 

Hallam, Constitutional History of England. 

Middle Ages. 
Hikok, Moral Science. 
Hildreth, History of the United States. 
Hosmer, The People and Politics. 
Hume, History of England. 
Ihering, The Struggle for Law. 
Jefferson, His Works. 

Laveleye, Elements of Political Economy. 
Lecky, History of European Morals. 

Rationalism in Europe. 
Lieber, Civil Liberty and Self-Government. 

Hermeneutics, with Notes by Judge Hammond. 

Political Ethics. 
Lubbock, Origin of Civilization. 
Macaulay, Essays. 

History of England. 

Life and Letters. 
Magazines, Forum, North American Review, Fortnightly, 
Westminster, Nineteenth Century, Chicago Law 
Times. 
Maine, His Works. 
Mallock, Property and Progress. 

Social Equality. 
May, Democracy in Europe. 
McCarthy, History of Our Own Times. 

Short History of Ireland. 
McMaster, History of the People of the United States. 



xvi PARTIAL LIST OF AUTHORITIES 

Mill, Principles of Political Economy. 

On Liberty. 

Representative Government. 
Miscellaneous, American Statesman Series. 

An Appeal to Pharaoh., Anonymous. 

Anglo-Saxon Law, Boston, 1876. 

Conflict in Nature and Life, Anonymous. 

Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

Reforms: Their Difficulties and Possibilities, Anony- 
mous. 

The English Citizen Series. 

The Federalist. 
Monroe, The People the Sovereigns. 
Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws. 
Morgan, Ancient Society. 
Morris, The Aryan Race. 
Miiller, Max, Science of Religion. 
Phillips, Labor, Land and Law. 
Rambaud, History of Russia. 
Ridpath, History of the United States. 
Roger, Social Economy. 

Work and Wages. 
St. John, History of Hayti. 
Spencer, Sociological Works. 
Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. 
StepniaJc, The Russian Peasantry. 
Sterne, Political Development of the United States. 
Stickney, Democratic Government. 
Story, Life and Letters. 

Miscellaneous Writings. 

On the Constitution. 



PARTIAL LIST OF AUTHORITIES xvii 

Straus, Origin of Republican Form of Government. 

Strong, Our Country. 

Stubbs, Constitutional History of England. 

Tacitus, Germania. 

Thompson, R. E., Political Economy. 

Tourgee, An Appeal to Caesar. 

Tylor, Primitive Culture. 

Wilson, Congressional Government. 

Woolsey, Political Science. 



THE GENESIS OF POPULAR POWER 



THE AMERICAN IDEA 



i. 

THE GENESIS OF POPULAR POWER. 

THHE idea of progress, which is the chief under- 
lying characteristic of the federal-republican 
polity, is pointed out as among the rarest phe- 
nomena of human history. Progress, in greater 
or less degree, there has been indeed among every 
known people; but, at the same time, the sta- 
tionary state is a conspicuous fact that holds true 
of by far the larger part of the human race. 
Nations have stuck at almost every step of the 
gradient from the lower stages of savagery up- 
ward. Even at this moment there remains, as 
Mr. Lecky phrases it, "so great a diversity 
among existing nations that traversing tracts of 
space is almost like traversing tracts of time, 
for it brings us in contact with living representa- 
tives of nearly every phase of past civilization." 
But the usual point of arrest, as Sir Henry 
Maine has remarked, is at that period of develop- 
ment where legal codes first appear enshrined 

[21] 



22 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

in written language. "It is indisputable," to 
quote the words of this excellent authority, 
"that much the greater part of mankind has 
never shown a particle of desire that its civil 
institutions should be improved since the moment 
when external completeness was first given to 
them by their embodiment in some permanent 
record." * This singular phenomenon is ex- 
plainable, partly at least, from the circumstance 
that to the primitive mind nothing is more 
loathed and dreaded than improvement or 
change, and it is obvious that codification con- 
served this deep-seated prepossession; for the 
laws being engraven on tablets and exposed to 
public view, the people were enabled from their 
knowledge of what the law was the better to 
resist attempts at innovation and reform. 

The Greeks stand out as the first people of 
history to get over this formidable stumbling- 
block. Here the rise of a healthful, vigorous 
intellectual and philosophic cast of mind began 
at an early date to supersede and dispel the 
mythical and superstitious predilection which 
hitherto had universally blunted and palsied 

* This theory of the development of popular influence set forth 
in this paper will be found fully elaborated by Sir Henry S. Maine 
in his Ancient Law, from which this passage is quoted. 



THE GENESIS OF POPULAR POWER 23 

every impulse to progress or to liberty. The 
Stoic philosophy was one of the notable fruits 
of this advance from the era of faith to the era 
of reason, and marks an epoch of incalculable 
importance in the trend of civilization thence- 
forward. But for this incident, it is believed that 
Western Aryan society, instead of having 
reached its present splendid heights in its ad- 
vances toward perfection, might still be linger- 
ing in that same dreary, rigid state that has been 
the hapless lot of their Asiatic ethnic kindred 
from time immemorial. The essential tenet of 
Stoicism with which we are here concerned was 
"the assertion of the existence of a bond of unity 
among mankind which transcended or annihi- 
lated all class or national distinctions," and 
which it was the end of philosophy to recognize 
and to conform to. This tenet was the bottom 
principle of the Roman jus naturale, and, 
through the thorough coalescence of the Stoical 
method with the Roman jurisprudence which 
eventually took place, this conception of a law 
of nature led to most momentous consequences, 
opening up, as it did, an exhaustless field for 
social and ethical speculation, and clearing the 
way for all subsequent human advancement. 
It is to this conception of a law of nature that 



24 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

we owe, among other things, the grand maxim 
laid down by the Roman jurisconsults as early 
as the third century of our era, that, "as far as 
natural law is concerned, all men are equal . . . 
all men are born free." This doctrine in its 
early acceptation bore only a legal or juridical 
significance; but, as time went on, it logically 
and practically yielded all important political 
and ethical results. It led, in the first place, to 
the supplanting of the primitive patriarchal 
notion of kinship as the bond of political union 
to that of geographical or territorial contiguity — 
a change of sentiment and method which alone 
made the modern state possible. It also did much 
more: As modified and extended successively 
through the enlightened and liberal speculations 
of Milton, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, 
and Jefferson, the jus naturale came finally 
to receive its best and highest expression as we 
find it formulated in our Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and in the institutions and laws of our 
Republic. To this same source also, are we to 
look for the birth and inspiration of those vast 
political, social, and industrial movements which, 
beginning with the Reformation, have since ex- 
erted such a prodigious influence in accelerating 
the growth and diffusion of democratic ideas 
throughout the Western Aryan world. 



POLITICS AND RELIGION 



II. 

POLITICS AND RELIGION. 

TN what has just been said of the evolution of 
the fundamental conceptions of popular gov- 
ernment, it will have been noticed that only 
secular agencies have been taken into account. 
This exposition of the subject would, obvi- 
ously, appear quite incomplete in view of the 
important claims which are so frequently and 
confidently put forth for religion in the same 
behalf. Some reference, therefore, to the con- 
nection between religion and politics is called for 
before passing from this branch of our inquiry. 
The religious impulse, or what answers to the 
religious impulse, is said to be universal among 
mankind. In the earlier stages of culture, this 
sentiment enters into and dominates all the con- 
cerns of life. Religion, law, and politics are 
blended together as one. The heads of the reli- 
gion are generally the heads of the State. All 
authority is assumed to be of direct divine com- 
mission. In ancient Greece, as we have seen, 
society was first enabled to free itself from the 
yoke imposed by this order of things and to start 

[27] 



28 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

upon the high-road of progress. Religion there 
had no doubt subserved a happy purpose in the 
furtherance of civilization up to a certain stage ; 
but the time came when the gods of the Pantheon 
lost their charm, and the God of Nature was 
enthroned in their stead. A somewhat analogous 
movement occurred among the Teutonic races in 
modern times. Most authorities agree that, up to 
the time of the revival of letters, the ecclesias- 
tical influence had been, in the main, favorable 
to general progress; but here again a period 
arrived when the horizon which the hierarchy had 
circumscribed about itself became too narrow 
and unyielding for the vigorous, expansive move- 
ments which its own efforts had incidentally 
been largely instrumental in setting in motion. 
Thenceforward the notion of direct divine inter- 
position in temporal affairs has been grad- 
ually losing its force in the public mind until 
it has come to be almost wholly eschewed in the 
formulas of law and politics both in Europe and 
America. Indeed, since the dawn of "the age of 
reason in the West," it is to the philosophic and 
rationalistic influence, and generally in spite of 
the sacerdotal, that we are to look for the inspira- 
tion and energizing principle of those gigantic 



POLITICS AND RELIGION 29 

political and intellectual forces which, in the 
latter part of the last century, so happily culmi- 
nated in the grand social upheaval which gave 
to the American colonies their independence and 
to mankind the best fruits of the French Revo- 
lution. 

Where the religious type of character is pro- 
nounced, resistance to change is the chief social 
trait. It is usually the habit of ecclesiastics to 
speak of religion "as ready-made from the 
beginning, as perfect in all its parts because 
revealed of God, and if liable to corruption, at 
all events incapable of improvement." * The 
logical effect of such a mental state or attitude, 
especially where it dominates all the details and 

* Advanced religious ideas, however, show undoubted signs of 
improvement — not in religion itself, but in religious ideas. H. H. 
Bancroft (History of Utah, 333) well states the facts in the 
following passage: "As the Christian world has advanced in 
civilization and intelligence these two thousand years or so, it 
has gradually left behind a little and a little more of its religion, 
first of the tenets of the Hebraic record, and then somewhat even 
of those of the later dispensation. Long before religionists began 
to question as myths the stories of Moses, and Jonah, and Job, 
they had thrown aside as unseemly blood-sacrifice and burnt- 
offerings, sins of uncleanness, the stoning of sabbath-breakers, the 
killing in war of women, children, and prisoners, the condemna- 
tion of whole nations to perpetual bondage, and many other 
revolting customs of the half-savage Israelites sanctioned by holy 
writ. This they did of their own accord, not because they were 



30 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

minutise of life, would be to impress the same 
conservatism upon the lineaments of civilization 
generally; and, as a matter of fact, such is the 
legitimate and inevitable outcome, as we may 
see fully illustrated in the melancholy history 
and seemingly hopeless fate of those swarming 
hordes of the human race that people the great 
continents of Asia and Africa. In mediaeval 
Europe the same tranced and passive social con- 
dition is witnessed. "A theological system," says 
Mr. Lecky, "had lain like an incubus upon 
Christendom, and to its influence, more than to 
any other single cause, the universal paralysis is 
to be ascribed." * Proof of this fact abounds. 
We have room here only for the bare mention of 
three or four typical illustrations. We read, for 

so commanded, but in spite of commandments, and by reason of a 
higher and more refined culture — a culture which had outgrown 
the cruder dogmas of the early ages. Then came the putting 
away of slavery and polygamy, the former but recently permitted 
in these American states, and the latter being here even now. 
Among the discarded customs taught and encouraged by the new 
testament are, speaking in tongues, going forth to preach without 
purse or scrip, laying on of hands for the healing of the sick, 
raising the dead, casting out devils, and all other miracles; and 
there will be further repudiations as time passes, further ignoring 
of portions of the scriptures by orthodox sects, a further weeding 
out of the unnatural and irrational from things spiritual and 
worshipful." — See also Max Miiller, Science of Religion, 126; 
Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 173. 
* Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i. 280. 



POLITICS AND RELIGION 31 

instance, that, "when in the middle of the eighth 
century an Irish saint, named St. Virgilius, . . . 
ventured in Bavaria to assert the existence of 
the Antipodes, the whole religious world was 
thrown into a paroxysm of indignation, St. 
Boniface heading the attack, and Pope Zackary, 
at least for a time, encouraging it." * Finally 
navigators sailed for the Antipodes, and the 
false theological conception had then of course 
to be abandoned. Again: "On the 24th of 
February, 1616, the consulting theologians of 
the Holy office characterized the two proposi- 
tions — that the sun is immovable in the centre 
of the world, and that the earth has a diurnal 
motion of rotation — the first as 'absurd in phi- 
losophy and formally heretical, because contrary 
to the Holy Scripture,' and the second as 'open 
to the same censure in philosophy, and at least 
erroneous as to faith.' " Because of his espousal 
of this Copernican theory, which the discoveries 
of Kepler, Newton, and others soon compelled 
everybody to believe, Galileo was incarcerated 
by order of a court of ecclesiastics and compelled 
under threat of torture to recant. The same 
narrow and repressive spirit was shown by the 
exceedingly ungracious temper in which the 

*See article "Galileo," Ency. Brit. 



32 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

head of the Church regarded the granting of 
Magna Charta. Says Dr. Draper on this point: 
"The wrath of the pontiff knew no bounds when 
he learned that the Great Charter had been con- 
ceded. In his bull he denounced it as base and 
ignominious; he anathematized the king if he 
observed it ; he declared it null and void. It was 
not the policy of the Roman court to permit so 
much as the beginnings of such freedom." * 
Religious persecution, with its long train of 
unspeakable horrors, is a terrible count in the 
same indictment/ The utter stamping out of all 
freedom of conscience and freedom of worship, 
rights which the f ramers of our government were 
so careful to intrench in the Constitution, and 
which we now prize as of the very essence of 
popular liberty, was the sole inspiring motive 
for the fiendish atrocities which were thus perpe- 
trated in the name of Christianity. 

All this, however, is not saying that mankind 
is not much indebted to Christianity as taught 
and practiced for the advancement of civilization 
and of good government ; though it must, never- 
theless, be confessed that in this case, as happens 
in many other cases, benefits often came about 
in ways least expected and least desired. Prof. 

* Intellectual Development of Europe, ii. 54. 



POLITICS AND RELIGION 33 

John Fiske, in his small but clever and instruc- 
tive work, The Beginnings of New England, 
tells how the straight-laced, bigoted Puritans of 
Massachusetts thus, by the unexpected turn of 
events, builded better than they knew, helping 
along, as they did materially, though uncon- 
sciously, the progress toward free conscience, 
free thought, and free government. These 
devoted though somewhat misguided Christians, 
in casting their fortunes in the New World, set 
out intent upon the establishment and perpetua- 
tion of a pure theocracy, but ended up by finding 
themselves, in spite of themselves, drifted into 
a purely secular republic. A similar course of 
things happened with the Church in the Middle 
Ages. The absolute equality of every human 
being before God was a doctrine which the early 
Christians inculcated with a zeal and enthusiasm 
that only an intense, all-engrossing conviction 
could inspire. "For the master and the slave," 
they proclaimed, "there was one law and one 
hope, one baptism, one Savior, one Judge." 
But, as from the time of Constantine onward the 
Church was usually found allied with the impe- 
rial secular power, it is reasonable to infer that, 
in propagating the notion of equality in things 
spiritual, the priesthood had no thought or 

3 



34 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

intention of opening the door to the extension of 
the same principle to things temporal. Yet such 
without doubt was the logical and practical 
effect. By parity of reasoning, ideas of equality 
in one thing would beget ideas of equality in 
other things. And no doubt such process of 
reasoning did, in the end, contribute much 
toward preparing the way for the conception 
and acceptance of those broad views of natural 
rights and natural justice which came at last to 
be acknowledged as among the rudimentary 
principles of civil government. 

A further incident fraught with important 
results attended the rise of Christianity. To the 
Pagan mind, ethics was a principle of philos- 
ophy; while to the Christian mind, it was a 
principle of religion. Through the former 
method, the influence of ethical teaching did not 
come into close touch with the masses; while 
through the latter method, such influence was 
brought within the reach of all. Dr. Draper, 
in his terse and vivid phrase, has described how 
through the Mediaeval Ages this blending of the 
moral and the religious gave "rise to numberless 
blessings in spite of the degradation and wicked- 
ness of man." Entering into detail, this luminous 



POLITICS AND RELIGION 35 

and learned writer proceeds to draw the follow- 
ing graphic picture: 

"The ideas of an ultimate accountability for personal 
deeds, of democratic instincts, were often found to be the 
inflexible supporters of right against might. Eventually 
coming to be the depositaries of the knowledge that then 
existed, they opposed intellect to brute force, in many 
instances successfully, and by the example of the organiza- 
tion of the Church, which was essentially republican, they 
showed how representative systems may be introduced into 
the State. Nor was it over communities and nations 
that the Church displayed her chief power. Never in 
the world before was there such a system. From her 
central seat at Rome, her all-seeing eye, like that of Provi- 
dence itself, could equally take in a hemisphere at a glance, 
or examine the private life of any individual. Her bound- 
less influences enveloped kings in their palaces, and 
relieved the beggar at the monastery gate. In all Europe 
there was not a man too obscure, too insignificant, or too 
desolate for her. Surrounded by her solemnities, every one 
received his name at her altar; her bells chimed at his 
marriage, her knell tolled at his funeral. She extorted 
from him the secrets of his life at her confessionals, and 
punished his faults by her penances. In his hour of sick- 
ness and trouble her servants sought him out, teaching him 
by her exquisite litanies and prayers, to place his reliance 
on God, or strengthening him for the trials of life by the 
example of the holy and just. Her prayers had an efficacy 
to give repose to the souls of his dead. When, even to his 



36 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

friends, his lifeless body had become an offense, in the name 
of God she received it into her consecrated ground, and 
under her shadow he rested till the great reckoning-day. 
Prom little better than a slave she raised his wife to be his 
equal, and forbidding him to have more than one, met her 
recompense for those noble deeds in a firm friend at every 
fireside. Discountenancing all impure love, she put round 
that fireside the children of one mother, and made that 
mother little less than sacred in their eyes. In ages of law- 
lessness and rapine, among people but a step above savages, 
she vindicated the inviolability of her precincts against the 
hand of power, and made her temples a refuge and sanc- 
tuary for the despairing and oppressed. Truly she was 
the shadow of a great rock in many a weary land I" * 

Here again it certainly could have been little 
prevised or suspected by these religious devotees 
that in the work to which they had thus conse- 
crated their lives, they were planting the seeds 
of "the great rebellion of the laity against the 
priesthood," to which, in the words of Macaulay, 
we are chiefly indebted "for political and intel- 
lectual freedom, and for all the blessings which 
political and intellectual freedom have brought 
in their train." Indeed, little more than a hun- 
dred years have elapsed since men's eyes any- 
where became fully opened to the fact that 
"political and intellectual freedom" is entirely 

* Physiology, bk. ii, ch. viii. 



POLITICS AND RELIGION 37 

compatible with a proper conception of the 
interests of the Church and of the cause of sound 
religion. 

It will have been noted that much that in the 
above passage from Dr. Draper is credited to 
Christian teaching and Christian ministration in 
the Middle Ages, is still a part of the Christian 
office and the Christian work. Especially is 
such the case with respect to what in the same 
connection the writer says of the fact that the 
civil law exerts an "exterior power in human 
relations," while Christianity produces, or is 
calculated to produce, "an interior or moral 
change." A very wide range of human activities, 
we know, falls within a region which the State 
never attempts to enter or to control. For 
example: "A man may be a bad husband, a 
bad father, a bad guardian, without coming into 
conflict with the rules of a single law. He may 
be an extortionate landlord, a wasteful tenant, 
a hard dealer." It is perhaps a fact, humiliating 
as it may seem,* that the fear of eternal damna- 
tion, quite as much as the love of God and the 

* An idea tersely and lucidly brought out by Prof. William 
Hoynes, Dean of the law department in the University of Notre 
Dame, in an article entitled What the Law Is, which recently 
appeared in the Law Journal of Chicago and The Scholastic, Notre 
Dame. 



38 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

hope of future bliss, acts as a powerful motive 
to proper conduct, and thus indirectly subserves 
the law. 

It is not contended, indeed, that Christianity 
is alone the keeper and educator of man's moral 
nature ; for we find that high standards of moral 
culture were evolved long ages before the Chris- 
tian era and among nations which, for aught 
we know, were in total ignorance as to even the 
Mosaic code. Great minds through all the 
preceding ages had been finding out, by means 
of their consciousness, their observation, and 
their experience, what best conduces to harmony, 
peace, purity, beauty, love, self-denial; and 
these aesthetic and utilitarian elements, which 
were scattered along through many centuries and 
among many peoples, these superior men gath- 
ered together and framed into maxims and prov- 
erbs to serve as standards of conduct for the 
individual and for society. In the same direc- 
tion are we to seek the source of our religious 
ideas. They are simply a growth from human 
consciousness and human experience, and are 
subject to precisely the same evolutionary modi- 
fications.* The wide diversity in religious beliefs 

* See Beecher's Evolution and Religion, where this theory is 
somewhat fully worked out. 



POLITICS AND RELIGION 39 

in all ages of the world and the material modifi- 
cations which scientific discoveries and the gen- 
eral advance of intelligence have produced in 
religious dogmas and religious interpretation 
should be enough to satisfy us upon this point. 
Religion, as we see it and as we know it, must 
necessarily always be in greater or less degree 
contaminated with the imperfections of human 
nature through which medium it appears to us, 
and cannot therefore represent a positive truth, 
or afford an infallible guide for conduct.* 

But what is here meant and what is here in- 
sisted upon is that Christianity is a part and an 
important part of that general scheme of the 
unfoldment of nature's laws, the tendency of 
which is, upon the whole, to elevate the char- 
acter and increase the comfort and happiness of 
the human race. So long, therefore, as those 
whose special mission it is to expound and dif- 
fuse Christian doctrine confine their efforts to the 
cultivation and refinement of the spiritual and 
moral nature and susceptibilities, such efforts are 
to be respected, lauded, encouraged. But when 
these agencies attempt to reach out beyond this 
wholesome, legitimate sphere, and to arrogate to 

* For very sensible observations on which see Stephen, Liberty, 
Equality, Fraternity, ch. vii. 



40 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

themselves the control of the legal and political 
machinery of the State, they are trenching upon 
forbidden ground, and essaying an interference 
which, in the present temper of the public mind, 
the jealous, quickened sense of the advanced 
society of our day, and especially of our country, 
would speedily and effectually resent. 



ANGLO-SAXON PROGRESSIVENESS 



III. 

ANGLO-SAXON PROGRESSIVENESS — DECLINE OF 
DEMOCRATIC UTOPIANISM. 

TN the march of progressive civilization during 
the last two or three hundred years the Anglo- 
Saxon* (or English-speaking) race claims to 
have held the foremost rank among the peoples 
of the earth. As Dr. Lieber has put it: "We 
belong to the Anglican tribe, which carries Angli- 
can principles and liberty over the globe, because, 
wherever it moves, liberal institutions and a com- 
mon law full of manly rights and instinct, with 
the principle of an expansive life, accompany it. 
We belong to that race whose obvious task it is, 
among other proud and sacred tasks, to rear and 
spread civil liberty over vast regions in every 
part of the earth, on continent and isle. We 

* Some writers, notably E. A. Freeman and John Fiske, have 
discarded the appellation Anglo-Saxon as not being properly 
applicable to the English-speaking peoples; but I have retained 
it herein for the reason that we have no other term to express the 
thought without resorting to circumlocution. The word Saxon is 
also used for the same purpose, for the sake of euphony, as in 
Slav and Saxon. 

[43] 



44 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

belong to that tribe which alone has the word 
S el f - Go vernment . " 

This race, though now widely dispersed over 
the globe and working out its destiny under dif- 
ferent flags, has yet enough of racial homology 
existing throughout its several branches to be 
considered one people so far as our present pur- 
pose is concerned. Taken in such totality, this 
race already comprises one-fifteenth of the whole 
human family, rules over four times as many 
more, possesses one-third of the earth's surface 
and owns over one-third of the world's wealth. 
Besides, this "race is multiplying not only more 
rapidly than any other European race, but far 
more rapidly than all the races of continental 
Europe. ... It is not unlikely that before the 
close of the next century this race will outnum- 
ber all the other civilized races of the world." 
Along with this phenomenal progress in popula- 
tion and material possessions, there has gone an 
equally rapid advancement in the "spread of civil 
liberty" and in the emancipation of thought in 
every department of rational inquiry. Thus, 
through the curious shiftings in the evolution of 
history, what was begun at Athens, the "mother 
of art and eloquence," has in the course of many 
centuries found its broader and more perfect 



ANGLO-SAXON PROGRESSIVENESS 45 

development in London and Washington, the 
centers of modern life and empire. 

The consciousness of such prestige has not 
always served to inspire us of Anglo-Saxon 
descent with an excess of modesty. John Bull's 
stock-boast that the sun never sets upon his 
dominions, and Brother Jonathan's ideal "Yan- 
keedom" stretching from pole to pole and from 
rising to setting sun, are familiar instances in 
point. A like overweening conceit has been 
indulged with respect to our political tenets. 
/ The twin gospels of Liberty and Equality had 
long been the cherished dream of the political 
optimist. Milton and Locke had sung their 
praises. Later, Montesquieu and Rousseau 
immensely popularized them. Our experiment, 
however, stands out as the first actual attempt 
to put such conception to practical test as the 
central fact of a nation's civil and political polity. 
Hamilton, Gerry, and Sherman gravely doubted. 
Franklin, Jefferson and Wilson were confident. 
Happily, the sentiment of the people at large 
was on the side of the latter, and the result, 
finally, was that the new dogma came to be 
accepted with an eagerness and enthusiasm which 
often bordered well-nigh upon fanaticism. 
Great Britain was more tardy in imbibing the 



46 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

spirit; but there, too, democracy has silently but 
steadily grown and spread till it has become tri- 
umphant. Reform bill after Reform bill has 
been passed in answer to the repeated and in- 
creasing popular demands, until it has come to 
be aptly said of the British Constitution that, 
"A Republic has insinuated itself beneath the 
folds of a Monarchy." 

This progressive tendency as yet shows little 
sign of abatement. Nor is it at all likely greatly 
to lag till the entire world has felt its touch and 
succumbed to its power. It is quite obvious, 
however, that the glow and fervor which once 
attended the movement are no longer present. 
Political thought, partaking of the general criti- 
cal and judicial temper of the time, has been 
forced to abandon the sentimental and visionary 
for the severely real and practical. Indeed, the 
reaction in not a f ew cases has gone so far as to 
betray an indifference, if not an actual aversion, 
toward the popular political and social proclivi- 
ties of the race and of the age. In our own 
country, the close of the Civil War seems to 
mark the beginning of this era of decadence in 
"gush," if not in patriotism and reason. The 
pyrotechnic Fourth of July orator of ante 
helium times has since been notable from his 



ANGLO-SAXON PROGRESSIVENESS 47 

absence. Fervid apostrophes to "The Constitu- 
tion" and "The Flag" now no longer charm the 
ear and move the heart as of old. Many of 
the evils which were thought to be peculiar to the 
Old World and to monarchical rule we are aston- 
ished to see creeping in amongst us. Grasping, 
conscienceless monopolies, it is seen, multiply 
and wax fat in the land. Strikes, lock-outs, and 
the like are almost constant spectacles, and not 
infrequently culminate in riot and bloodshed. 
The tramp, it is pointed out, has come among 
us, and come seemingly to stay; and we have 
even felt it prudent or necessary upon occasion 
to "make an example" of a few of the more 
pestiferous characters that were thought to be 
menacing our social order. While we have no 
royalty, no aristocracy, no established church, no 
law of entail or of primogeniture, we are yet 
twitted with having the "upper ten and lower 
ten thousand," all the same. Even the funda- 
mental conceptions — the famous so-called "self 
evident" "truths" — upon which our social fabric 
was founded, no longer pass unchallenged. For 
instance, Dr. Hosmer, an able American author, 
in a recent elaborate work, flatly asserts that 
"few things are plainer" than that the idea of 
liberty and the idea of equality rigidly exclude 



48 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

one another; "that liberty is the necessary source 
of inequality, and that equality can only be 
secured and maintained by a tyranny whose first 
law is the denial of all individual freedom." On 
the other side of the water, Stephen, Maine, 
Mallock, Griffin, and other widely-read authors 
argue to the same purport. Justice Stephen, 
the eminent English jurist and law-writer, is 
especially pronounced in this direction. Like 
Macaulay, he utterly scouts Mill's generally 
accepted notions of popular liberty, and bluntly 
tells us that "popular institutions, as we know 
them, ... by no means deserve that blind ad- 
miration and universal applause with which they 
are usually received." In his opinion, "real sub- 
stantial inequalities — inequalities of talent, of 
education, of sentiment, of religious belief, and 
therefore of the most binding of all obligations — 
never were so great as at the present moment. 
I doubt much," he adds, "whether the power of 
particular persons over their neighbors has ever 
in any age of the world been so well denned and 
so easily and safely exerted as at present." 
Little wonder, therefore, that, amid such reeking 
doubt and disbelief, the now baronetted bard of 
JLocksley Hall, turning his back upon his earlier 
and nobler instincts, should no longer discourse 



ANGLO-SAXON PROGRESSIVENESS 49 

in serenely flowing numbers of "the thoughts of 
men" widening with "the process of the suns." 
Rather should we expect the morbid, petulant 
outbursts of the cynic of Sixty Years After: 

"Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race 
of men ; 
Have we risen out of the beast, then back into the beast 



again 



?" 



The problems which are vexing us on this side 
of the Atlantic, we hardly need be told, are 
pressing with no less force and persistency our 
kinsfolk beyond. Indeed, if we may give cre- 
dence to the general out-givings from that quar- 
ter, much more troublesome ailments are at 
present plaguing the United Kingdom than are 
plaguing the United States. To begin with, the 
Irish complications seem to be growing all the 
while from bad to worse, and to be possible of 
termination only in the independence or in the 
depopulation of Ireland. Then the colonial 
relations of England are becoming far from 
comforting to her contemplation. These de- 
pendencies, it is seen, are making rapid progress 
in all the elements essential to an independent 
political autonomy. If there ever was a ne- 
cessity — as there doubtless was — for these 



50 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

communities being attached to the Crown, that 
necessity, it is also seen, is rapidly passing away, 
if indeed it has not already gone by. The fact 
cannot have escaped the reader of the current 
discussions of the colonial question, that the 
American and Australasian British provinces 
are now riper and better equipped for setting 
up business on their own account than were the 
original British colonies of America when sepa- 
ration from the mother country was first 
seriously agitated. While loyalty to the Queen 
is still with every Englishman unquestionably a 
religiously cherished sentiment, it is yet plain 
enough that the colonial situation is becoming an 
extremely critical one. So generally is this 
understood, that not a few of the recognized 
leaders of public opinion in Great Britain are 
repeatedly and strenuously urging that a recast- 
ing of the British Constitution is a paramount 
necessity, if the integrity of the Empire is to be 
maintained.* If something be not devised, and 
devised soon, in the way of a "United British 
Empire" or some other similar scheme to bring 
about a closer union of the Central Government 

* For discussions of this topic see Mr. Froude's writings. Also 
The Nineteenth Century, Jan. and Feb. 1885, and The Forum, 
Nov. 1888. 



ANGLO-SAXON PROGRESSIVENESS 51 

and its outlying parts, it is feared, and for good 
reason, that the widely-scattered provinces, upon 
the first adverse turn of events, might take it into 
their heads to pattern after the suggestive Amer- 
ican example of 1776. Such process of dismem- 
berment once begun, it is easy to imagine that it 
could not be stayed till the "Mistress of the 
Seas" might herself be blotted from the map of 
nations. 



SAXON OR SLAV — LIBERTY OR 
DESPOTISM 



IV. 

SAXON OR SLAV LIBERTY OR DESPOTISM. 

A NOTHER occasion for solicitude, and one 
involving the destiny not only of the "Scep- 
tred Isle" but of all Anglosaxondom, is coming 
to be discussed with increasing interest and fre- 
quency by the graver class of the periodicals and 
speakers of the day. The following excerpt 
from the London Spectator of July 4, 1885, 
though originally appearing in a somewhat dif- 
ferent connection, will serve in part to illustrate 
what is here meant : 

"In 1984, when the world contains a thousand millions 
of white faces, six hundred millions of these will be English 
and Germans, and three hundred millions will be Slav. 
There will practically be no other white races, the French 
not increasing, the Spaniards increasing slowly — if, indeed, 
as in Mexico, they do not rather suffer absorption into a 
dark people; the Scandinavian having stopped absolutely; 
and the Irishman, true to his destiny, helping only to swell 
the power of the race he professes to detest. If the Teuton 
and the Slav can keep friends, the world is theirs; and if 
not, there will be the most terrible struggle recorded in 
history since the white barbarians fought the white Romans 

[55] 



56 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

and their darker allies. We are not sure that an agreement 
is possible until a great fight has taken place, for Slav and 
Teuton seem unwilling to comprehend each other, though 
there is not between them the internecine hatred sometimes 
observed in history; but if their statesmen could arrange 
terms on which the conflict could be permanently avoided, a 
huge mass of misery might be saved to our immediate 
descendants. To avoid the quarrel will be difficult, for the 
Slav is just now strangled; and to reach the open water, 
and so take his natural part in .the greater movement of 
mankind, he must pitch himself on somebody, be it on 
Turkey, or England, or China ; but the means of avoidance 
are worth the study and patience of years. Mankind is 
not very likely to be happy when all is done, for in all this 
movement is no cure for sin, or pain, or poverty; anxiety 
increases as fast as intelligence, and sympathy — which 
means suffering — faster than strength; but one grand con- 
dition of even moderate well-being is that Slav and Teuton 
should learn how to live together in peace. If not, the 
Teuton may some day — in less than a century — find that 
every third white man is a foe, and that the third man has 
the power of ranging behind him the darker races of man- 
kind. The Teuton has the art of dominance ; but the Slav 
has gained a strong hold wherever he has ruled, and can 
do at least one thing we cannot, — he can conquer the 
Turanian without rousing his unquenchable hate. Now, 
the Turanian is the only race not white which should in 
1984 be strong." 

What figure will the Colossus of the Antipodes 
(China) cut in the coming evolution of nations? 



SAXON OR SLAV 57 

Later speculations on the subject reduce the 
conditions of the problem to still greater sim- 
plicity than The Spectator has here given it. 
For instance, according to Mr. Foulke, in his 
recent thoughtful little volume entitled Slav 
and Saxon, England and Russia, representing 
respectively the Saxon and the Slav, are the 
coming colossal powers which are to be pitted 
against each other in this stupendous conflict. 
These nations, as everybody knows, have long 
been far from bosom friends. For years their 
Asiatic borders have been the source of constant 
irritation and quarrel between them; and some- 
where upon this disputed territory, it is pre- 
dicted that the initial battle will be fought. 
"Let India fall," reasons Mr. Foulke, "and 
Russia is assured the dominion of a continent." 
But would a continent indeed satisfy Russia's 
lust of dominion, sharpened and intensified, as 
in that event it would be, from the flush of vic- 
tory and the glory of conquest? "Our (Ameri- 
can) interests in this question," as the same 
writer suggests, "seem to be very remote. We 
are so far from the scene of the conflict that it 
looks as though its consequences would never 
reach us. But if the great Eastern World, con- 
taining almost the whole population of the globe, 



58 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

should become subjected to the iron yoke of 
military rule, would it stop there? Would there 
be any limit to the aggressions of despotism?" 
The formidable and rapidly growing power and 
prestige of the Muscovite is certainly a matter 
not to be lightly and flippantly set aside. 
Already clutching in his iron grasp more than a 
sixth of the habitable globe, and boasting a popu- 
lation almost a third as great as that of all 
Europe outside of his own European dominions, 
this crafty, eager, aggressive autocrat is coming 
more and more to be regarded as a standing 
menace to Western civilization. When, again, 
we take into account his adroitness in appropri- 
ating and centralizing power, and his amazing 
tact and facility in absorbing and assimilating 
the vast Turanian and Mongolian hordes upon 
his Asiatic borders, his attitude and his move- 
ments would seem to become with still greater 
emphasis matters of grave and portentous 
concern. 

Now this pessimistic view of the situation is 
certainly far from gratifying to Anglo-Saxon 
pride and aspiration. Nor is it to be denied that 
there is much in the outlook presented that 
demands a vigilant, sagacious statesmanship, and 
the constant, active, zealous regard of an enlight- 



SAXON OR SLAV 59 

ened and patriotic people. The picture, how- 
ever, upon closer scrutiny is found not to be 
without its better and brighter side. First, take 
the dangers alleged to be menacing us from Rus- 
sian aggression. Attention to a few salient facts 
will, we think, go far toward removing any 
apprehension of probable peril from that quar- 
ter. The Russian system is, to begin with, 
almost wholly alien and external. It is a despot- 
ism distinctively after the oriental type. Its 
chief function is tax-gathering and tax-consum- 
ing. No connecting link or bond of unity is 
found between the ruling class and the subject 
class — no community of interest, of sympathy, 
of aspiration, or of ideas. Once lift the pressure 
imposed from above and the Empire must in- 
stantly crumble into its original constituents. 
Again, few, if any, usages, rights, or guaranties 
exist which the Czar is bound to respect. In 
theory, and, for the most part in fact, the impe- 
rial will is the law. There are, therefore, no sure 
props to lean upon, no common heritages to cher- 
ish, nothing to stimulate patriotism, nothing to 
cement the society, nothing to impart to the body 
politic the life, the strength, the unity, the con- 
sistency, the homogeneity of a true organic 
whole. Anglo-Saxon society, on the other hand, 



60 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

is self-constructive, self-poised, self-recupera- 
tive, self-perpetuating. Coercion has little part 
either in its structure or in its functions. It 
springs spontaneously from beneath and from 
within, and is not forcibly imposed from above 
or from without. It is a composite body — a 
"plural unit" — made up chiefly of forms and 
organisms which Dr. Lieber has styled "institu- 
tions,'' and which, in his Civil Liberty and Self- 
Govemment, he insists at length and with con- 
vincing logic are of the spirit and essence of free 
government and the strongest surety for its well- 
being and preservation. These institutions may 
be enumerated as the trial by jury, the habeas 
corpus, the right of petition, the immunity from 
unlawful search and seizure, the principle of 
local self-government, the common law, the 
public school, the freedom of speech and of wor- 
ship, together with the various other funda- 
mental principles, usages, and ideas which we 
observe in regular operation as constituent parts 
of our social organism. Supplementing and 
reinforcing the general or public agencies, are 
the thousand and one religious, benevolent, com- 
mercial, educational, and other extra-political 
associations or bodies. Many of these institu- 
tions have a long and eventful history of their 



SAXON OR SLAV 61 

own, and have been wrought out at great cost of 
brain, and toil, and blood; but have now become 
so firmly rooted into the organic life, and are 
so closely intertwined one with another and each 
with all, that, we are sure, no possible shock or 
strain either from without or from within can 
ever seriously harm, much less wholly destroy, 
the general structure. Indeed, were it possible 
to strike down the outer framework to-day, we 
are confident that these inner forces would re- 
build it to-morrow.* These marked characteris- 
tics of the Anglo-Saxon explain why through all 
his otherwise checkered history, the growth and 
development of his institutions and his distinc- 
tive individuality have nowhere or at any time 
met with long or serious check or interruption. 
With us of America, even the strain of the Civil 

* "There is nothing that more forcibly strikes a person arriv- 
ing for the first time from the European continent, either in the 
United States or in England, than the thousand-fold evidences 
of an all-pervading associative spirit in all moral and practical 
spheres, from the almost universal commercial copartnerships and 
associations, the 'exchanges' of artisans, and banks, to those 
unofficial yet national associations which rise to real grandeur. 
Strike out from England or America this feature and principle, 
and they are no longer the same self-relying, energetic, in- 
domitably active people. The spirit of self-government would be 
gone. In France, an opposite spirit prevails." — Civ. Lib. and 
Self-Qov. i. 147. 



62 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

War, intense and long-protracted as it was, 
seemed to accelerate rather than to retard the 
country's onward career, and, what is more, to 
have added still brighter luster to the name and 
prestige of free institutions and free government 
the world over. We remember indeed that for 
a time after President Lincoln's assassination 
there was much discussion as to the necessity of 
keeping a "strong man" at the helm of State; 
and we remember also that when President Gar- 
field lay in a critical state from the effects of 
Guiteau's bullet, many well-meaning persons 
became much concerned lest the death of the 
Chief Magistrate, should it happen, might pre- 
cipitate general disaster and ruin upon the coun- 
try. Such apprehensions, let us trust, betray the 
want of a true conception of the genius and 
structure of Anglo-Saxon society, and especially 
of the genius and structure of American society. 
For, verily, the greatest and most illustrious of 
our statesmen and heroes will come and go in the 
future, as they have come and gone in the past, 
producing little more effect upon the current of 
public events than if here a bubble had blown 
and there a bubble burst. 

As to the practical aspects of the competing 
systems — the autocratical and the popular — a 



SAXON OR SLAV 63 

like disparity appears. According to James 
Wilson, the eminent statesman and jurist of our 
national constitution-making period, the advan- 
tages of the monarchic form "are strength, 
despatch, secrecy, unity of council"; and from 
similar impressions the notion has gotten abroad 
that under such government, the supervision 
being more immediate and direct, a closer and 
stricter accountability, and accordingly a purer 
and more efficient administrative service, is at- 
tainable than where the public authority is less 
centralized. But the Russian example, wherein 
such centralization has been carried to its fullest 
logical results, does not by any means warrant 
that assumption. So far from it, it is said that 
corruption and peculation in office in that coun- 
try are so rife and so glaring that it has come to 
be a popular proverb among the common people 
that "Christ himself would steal were his hands 
not nailed to the cross." The monstrous and per- 
sistent exactions and abuses of power and privi- 
lege which under this system find a place are 
most deplorable indeed in their effects upon the 
common people. The reader of Stepniak's lurid 
pages on The Russian Peasantry can scarcely 
conceive of a more impoverished, wretched, hap- 
less condition than that to which this class, which 



64 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

constitutes the bulk of the Russian masses, has 
been from this cause reduced. The liberation of 
the serf in that far-away region, we remember, 
was hailed as a signal triumph of the cause of 
popular liberty, and long and loud were the 
praises to Alexander throughout Christendom 
for his generous, righteous deed. Yet, as the 
matter has turned out, that act has proved itself 
to have been premature and ill-advised; for the 
stubborn fact confronts us that the condition of 
the emancipated classes has since their freedom 
steadily grown from bad to worse. When in 
serfdom, the moujik (peasant) did enjoy certain 
recognized rights in the soil he cultivated; but, 
under the squeezing process since systematically 
pursued, he has become the helpless, pitiable 
prey to the most grinding species of agrarianism 
ever known to history. Among much other even 
more startling details, the author above quoted 
says: "As to the impoverishment of the masses 
measured by the reduced consumption of food 
and the increased rate of mortality it is frightful 
and intense, and shows no signs of abatement. 
. . . The bulk of our peasantry are in a condi- 
tion not far removed from actual starvation — a 
fact which can neither be denied nor concealed 
by the official press." William E. Curtis and 



SAXON OR SLAV 65 

other competent and trustworthy authorities who 
speak from personal observation and experience, 
fully corroborate this astounding tale of woe. 
Could the average Anglo-Saxon ever be reduced 
to such an abject condition? We shall fain 
believe that the time has long gone by, if indeed 
it ever existed, when such a thing could be con- 
sidered within the list of possible results. 

And now, lastly, as to what are the probabili- 
ties in this connection considered from an evolu- 
tionary point of view. Frederic Harrison, in a 
recent magazine article on the Revolution of 
1789, describes that critical period in the history 
of France as, in its inmost spirit and normal 
manifestation, "an organic evolution. It was a 
movement," he proceeds to say, "in no sense 
local, accidental, temporary, or partial; it was 
not simply, nor even mainly, a political move- 
ment. It was an intellectual and religious, a 
moral, social, and economic movement before it 
was a political movement. ... It was not an 
episode in the life of a single nation. In all its 
deeper elements it is a condensation of the his- 
tory of mankind, a repertory of all social and 
political problems." This movement, thus so 
vigorously described, is in essence and historical 
sequence identical with that which is impelling 

5 



66 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

the Western Aryan races forward in their 
courses to-day, only that now such movement, 
under the ripening and softening influence of ad- 
vancing thought, is freed from that delirium and 
wanton ferocity which were its revolting ac- 
companiments a hundred years ago. The same 
active, aggressive spirit and tendency are certain, 
as we feel, to attend and control the advancing 
dominance of the white man as his rule and occu- 
pancy overspread the earth. This sublime move- 
ment the autocrat by the "sacred Neva" can no 
more resist than King John could resist the 
demands of the barons at Runnymeade ; no more 
than Charles I. could resist the outcry for par- 
liamentary supremacy as opposed to royal pre- 
tensions; no more than Louis XVI. could resist 
the "ideas of '89," which swept away the last 
relics of feudalism in France; no more than 
George III. could resist the achievement of 
American independence; no more than the "slave 
power" of our own generation could resist the 
destruction of negro slavery in this country, 
where it was held by its votaries to exist by virtue 
of constitutional as well as divine sanction. In a 
word, the widespread and rapidly advancing 
power of democracy is acknowledged alike by 
friend and foe everywhere, and its ultimate 



SAXON OR SLAV 67 

universal triumph the signs of the times would 
seem to point to with equal certainty. The low, 
hoarse rumblings of the Nihilist* and other con- 
spirators against existing Russian order are 
surcharged with ominous significance to the auto- 
cratic ear. They are, we may trust, the premoni- 
tory symptoms of that grand popular upheaval 
which, culminating from the gradually accumu- 
lating forces beneath, is sooner or later sure to 
break forth in every nook and corner of that long- 
scourged land. The inevitable outcome in that 
event will be the accession of another vast section 
of the earth's surface to the list of democratic 
conquests. The railroad, the steamboat, the tele- 
graph, the printing press, and the multiplication 
and diffusion of the industrial and mechanical 
arts, to say nothing of the advances of scientific 
research and discovery, are rapidly hastening 
this result. In the development, spread, and 
utilization of these ameliorating agencies, the 
Anglo-Saxon stands confessedly peerless; a cir- 
cumstance which manifestly yields him great 
advantage in the race for mastery. His superior 
skill, enterprise, and intelligence carry with them 
superior command over the physical and moral 

* By this term is meant all Russians opposed to present Russian 
order, whether Destructionists or not. 



68 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

forces upon which the welfare of civilization 
chiefly depends. As a result, enterprise is stimu- 
lated, fresh conquests over nature are won, 
the means of subsistence are multiplied and 
expanded, and thereby a more populous, pros- 
perous, and powerful nationality becomes as- 
sured. This preponderance in progressive 
energy is likely, as we believe, to strengthen and 
expand in accelerated ratio as time goes on for 
years and perhaps centuries to come. For these 
reasons, and others which might be set forth, we 
may believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon, and not 
the Slav, that is ultimately to win the universal 
mastery of mankind and to shape the destiny of 
civilization thenceforward. Those races which — 
like the American Indian and the Polynesian 
tribes, for example, — cannot or will not bear 
absorption or assimilation in this process of 
expansion, must succumb to the inexorable 
decree, — the "survival of the fittest." Nor need 
harsh or violent measures be invoked to that end. 
Let industry, commerce and science follow their 
natural tendency, and, silently and peaceably yet 
none the less surely and effectively, will the work 
be accomplished. 



' THE OUTLOOK AS TO DANGERS 
FROM WITHIN 



V. 

THE OUTLOOK AS TO DANGERS FROM WITHIN. 

PJUT if Anglo-Saxon civilization is, as we have 
here assumed, comparatively secure from 
danger from without, what shall we say as to the 
probabilities of danger from within ? In the first 
place, we scarcely need be reminded that we are 
not as yet to expect ideal perfection in political 
government, whatever its form. Far as the 
Anglo-Saxon of this age has left primitive sav- 
agery behind, he is yet still farther from that 
state of Utopian harmony which the optimistic 
dreamers have so long sought but never found. 
The student of social phenomena becomes more 
and more impressed at every step of his progress 
with the difficulties and perplexities that lie in 
the way of adjusting the operations of govern- 
ment upon anything like rational ideas of justice, 
right, and reason.* As Ernst Haeckel has put 
it, nowhere in nature, no matter where we turn 

* See especially Conflict in Nature and Life, and Reforms : 
Their Difficulties and Possibilities. 

[71] 



72 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

our eyes, does that idyllic peace celebrated by the 
poets exist. Rather do we find everywhere, and 
at all times, "a pitiless, embittered Struggle of 
All against All. . . . Passion and Selfishness — 
conscious or unconscious — is everywhere the 
motive force of life*" * The spectacle thus pre- 
sented, when we come to reflect upon it, is seen 
to be, so far as man is concerned, but the practi- 
cal operations of that law of compensation which 
was pronounced from the beginning, — "In the 
sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." It is 
unnecessary in the present connection to enter 
into the general philosophical bearings of this 
law or divine command. Suffice it to say, that 
it but serves as the crucial process through which 
and by which alone truth is evolved, man's capa- 
bilities developed, and society leavened with 
whatever of symmetry and principle it has come 
to possess. Thus, through what Herbert Spencer 

* Senator J. J. Ingalls on this point: "The purification of 
politics is an iridescent dream. Government is force. Politics is 
a battle for supremacy. Parties are the armies. The decalogue 
and the golden rule have no place in a political campaign. The 
object is success. To defeat the antagonist and expel the party 
in power is the purpose. The Republicans and Democrats are as 
irreconcilably opposed to each other as were Grant and Lee in the 
Wilderness. They use ballots instead of guns, but the struggle 
is as unrelenting and desperate and the result sought for the 
same." 



DANGERS FROM WITHIN 73 

calls the "discipline of circumstances," society 
has "softened while it has ripened," and the 
mental, moral, and social standard at large has 
gradually risen to a state immeasurably above 
where we find it at the time we catch our first 
glimpses of the human race. Man-eating, theft, 
murder, the sacrificial altar, polygamy, and 
slavery, for example, have been either put aside 
or outlawed everywhere among the nations of 
Christendom ; and it may not be unreasonable to 
assume, with Herbert Spencer, that this same 
discipline of circumstances which has already 
wrought such marked amelioration will go on 
working still further improvements until eventu- 
ally there shall be comparatively little need of 
"judges or statute-books" or of "prospects of 
future reward or punishment" as incentives for 
men to do what is right and to desist from what 
is wrong. 

But such approximate fitness for the social 
state is an attainment infinitely slow of growth; 
and, for the present, and for a long period to 
come, we should not expect too much of our pro- 
gressive institutions. Where so wide a field is 
left to the exercise of individual volition — which 
of itself is an indispensable condition of prog- 
ress — incongruities and abuses will be constantly 



74 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

obtruding themselves upon us, sometimes to a 
formidable and alarming extent. 

Among the things at present perplexing 
society where it has attained a highly differen- 
tiated state, are the knotty complications attend- 
ing the rapid concentration of business and capi- 
tal in enormous aggregates, and the consequent 
corresponding increase in the number and de- 
pendency of the wage-working classes. When, 
therefore, speakers and writers, like Chauncey 
M. Depew and Andrew Carnegie, for example, 
undertake to expatiate in florid rhetoric upon our 
country's wonderful growth and development 
since the close of our Civil War, and to point to 
the period intervening as constituting for this 
reason the golden age of the Republic, they 
unhappily leave a tale half told. Bishop 
Spalding, the distinguished Catholic prelate, has 
turned attention to the less poetic side of the 
picture. "A democracy," he takes occasion to 
admonish us, "where the millions own nothing 
and the few own millions must fatally fall a 
prey to socialistic, communistic, and anarchic 
turbulence, and though thus far there is here no 
proper soil for such germs to sprout in, the policy 
which uses all the powers of government to build 
nests for paupers who, like unfledged birds, shall 



DANGERS FROM WITHIN 75 

eat only when capitalists drop food into their 
mouths, will soon supply the lacking condition. 
. . . Our enormous growth in wealth and popu- 
lation blinds us to the truth that the end of popu- 
lar government is not to make a country rich and 
prosperous, but to establish morality as the basis 
of life and law. Character, and not wealth and 
numbers, is our social ideal." 

Ex-Congressman Phillips, in his instructive 
treatise on Labor, Land, and Law, gives us some 
startling statistics as to the operations of this 
tendency of the few owning millions and the 
millions owning nothing with respect to land- 
holding in this country. He tells us that accord- 
ing to the census figures of 1880, more than a 
fourth of the farms in the United States have 
already fallen into the condition of landlord and 
tenant. Over sixty per cent, of the persons occu- 
pied in farming are wage-hands. Probably as 
much as forty per cent, of the nominal farm- 
owners are paying a round rent in the form of 
interest, and with a large proportion of these it 
can only be a question of time when they must 
succumb to their capitalistic masters. "We have 
at this time," says this well-informed writer, 
"almost as many tenant renters as there are in 
the British Islands. The worst forms of renting 



76 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

and metayer tenancy prevail. We have no legis- 
lation to secure the rights of the cultivator, and 
none to induce or protect necessary agricultural 
improvements." The situation, moreover, is 
greatly aggravated by the circumstance of our 
immense alien land-holdings. To say nothing of 
the vast tracts seized upon by home capitalists, 
speculators, corporations, syndicates, and so on, 
we find, for example : Four hundred and twenty- 
five thousand acres credited to the Duke of Cum- 
berland; one million seven hundred and fifty 
thousand acres to the Marquis of Tweeddale; a 
half million acres in Florida to a Scotch com- 
pany; two million acres in the same state to Sir 
Richard Reid & Co.; and three million acres in 
the state of Texas to a company of English 
speculators. The lands — agricultural, mining, 
timber, etc. — that are held by capitalists, home 
and foreign, in tracts of five hundred acres and 
upwards make up in their totality a detail too 
enormous for recital here. It is enough to know 
that well-nigh the whole of our public domain in 
the Great West has been thus unhappily appro- 
priated, and that in our country everywhere the 
alarming process of squeezing out the smaller 
independent cultivators is going on, thereby 



DANGERS FROM WITHIN 77 

laying the foundation for a landed aristocracy, or 
a landed monopoly, it making little difference 
practically as to the name. Almost precisely the 
same conditions are now being reproduced in this 
country as occurred in Europe during the Middle 
Ages when the smaller alodial holdings were 
swallowed up by the powerful feudal chiefs. 

In the industrial world a no less uninviting 
phenomenon is thrust before us. "Combines" of 
one sort and another are out-heroding Herod in 
their scramble to fasten on to anything and 
everything in sight which may appear to promise 
safe and profitable investment. Accordingly, 
we have the coal trust, the steel trust, the oil 
trust, the sugar trust, the meat trust, the twine 
trust, and so on ad infinitum. The chances for 
any man to build himself up from the bottom in 
any of the old industries are becoming fewer and 
fewer day by day. Occasionally some man born 
with exceptional pluck may yet be seen striking 
out in some enterprise on his own account, think- 
ing to earn an independent living for himself 
and family as his father had done before him; 
but ten chances to one if such individual does not 
sooner or later find himself in the rank and file 
of the "tin-pail brigade" as a wage-worker for 



78 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

some huge corporation, it may be for the very 
corporation which was, indirectly at least, the 
occasion of his collapse. 

Thus we observe, as the good Bishop has 
warned us, that our country is speedily drifting 
towards the condition of a plutocracy on the one 
hand and a proletariat on the other. Popular 
power thus far has served to little, if any, pur- 
pose in warding off this sinister tendency. In 
Great Britain and her American and Australa- 
sian colonies, where democratic influence pre- 
vails as nowhere else outside of Switzerland and 
our own country, the discrepancy in the number 
of freeholders and non-freeholders is also stead- 
ily increasing; while in every other interest, busi- 
ness, or occupation of life the same sort of 
cankerous influences are in like degree active and 
alive. 

Such perplexities, we say, are to a greater or 
less extent inseparable from our present moral 
and social state; but this is not saying that the 
outcome must necessarily prove fatal. On the 
contrary, we hold that there is both a disposition 
and a means available in society, not indeed to 
annihilate all evil absolutely, but so far to repress 
or control it in any of its particular manifesta- 
tions as to strip it of power for disastrous or 



DANGERS FROM WITHIN 7D 

irretrievable harm. When the masses become 
fully aroused to the enormity of any particular 
wrong or to the danger of any particular 
exigency, which will certainly happen if the pres- 
sure be severe and public opinion be allowed to 
crystallize and to act, the battle will half be 
fought and won — the true remedy will no longer 
be far to seek. 

"Be there a will, and wisdom finds a way." 

To attempt to lay down an exact prescription 
to fit every case would not of course be practica- 
ble, so narrow is the range of human knowledge 
and so wide and varied the world of human ills. 
Still, a few general suggestions looking in this 
direction may not be wholly without profit. 
First, then, let it be accepted as a primary social 
truth and enforced as an unvarying maxim 
of public policy that "sharpness of wit" as 
Mr. Froude has it, "gives no higher title to 
superiority than bigness of bone and muscle" 
and that "the power to overreach requires re- 
straint as much as the power to rob and hill" 
It may indeed be found not an easy task, in 
endeavoring to apply this principle practically, 
to set due "restraint" upon "the power to over- 
reach" without at the same time clogging the 
wheels of civilization generally. This much at 



80 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

least can be effectually seen to, namely, that the 
enginery of State be not perverted to aggravate 
the cause of complaint. It is the pampering 
and coddling by government, or the gross negli- 
gence or villainous complicity in high places, that 
most enables monopolies to feed and fatten. 
Surely, the period has now been reached and 
passed where, with due regard for the public 
good, we should employ the powers of govern- 
ment by legislation or otherwise further to stimu- 
late and foster such prurient, overgrown cor- 
porations as the political and economic policy of 
this country for the past twenty years and more 
has brought into being. Cut off such favoritism, 
and it may be that the levelling tendency of the 
ordinary economic forces would suffice to curb 
conscienceless rapacity within decent bounds. 
But, in any and every event, let it be understood, 
once for all, that the right and the power of 
society to rid itself of wrongs and abuses is inher- 
ent and inalienable, whatever the measures which 
may be found necessary to such end. 

With regard to the monopoly of the soil and 
the consequent monopoly of the opportunities 
for independently acquiring a livelihood, we are 
not without precedent as to remedies for abuses, 
terribly rigorous and sweeping though in some 



DANGERS FROM WITHIN 81 

instances these have been. We quote from a 
writer in The Forum of November, 1888: 

"Periodical readjustments of property have come with 
every epoch. When society felt itself too much stifled 
under the tightening bonds of the few, there came a spasm. 
In one night the French peasantry set ten thousand manor 
houses blazing, and so revolutionized the tenure of property 
which for three centuries had been little disturbed. The 
spoliation of the monastery lands in the sixteenth century 
by grasping lords and greedy court favorites was a wide- 
spread readjustment. The Jews lost their lands in Spain 
in the fifteenth century, and the Jesuits were cleared off 
theirs in the eighteenth. Laws of entail to the contrary 
notwithstanding, half of England was taken out of the grip 
of the Catholic recusants under Queen Elizabeth, and 
vested in the tools of the Star Chamber. Cromwell 
originated the Irish land question by sweeping the Celts 
out of three-fourths of Ireland and planting his Ironsides 
in their place. With such examples before us and knowing 
that revolutions operate as safety valves of the social 
mechanism, we cannot but expect a transition from the old- 
fashioned notion of right, especially when we reflect that 
the creed of loyalty and obedience is no more, and that the 
desires of men have most broadened with the progress of 
the suns. A revision of ideas on property rights is in fact 
one of the marked tendencies of the present time." 

Later, the same policy of seizure and seques- 
tration of ecclesiastical holdings was mercilessly 
pursued in all, or nearly all, the Spanish- 
6 



82 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

American States. We do not say that such 
extreme measures should be countenanced or re- 
peated. We believe, on the contrary, that in our 
age and under our system peaceful and lawful 
remedies may be had for the seeking. We know 
that by the passage of the Irish Land Bill of 
1870, the Parliament of Great Britain seriously 
infringed the long established right of contract in 
assuming the authority to fix an equitable rental 
and to establish a certain property or partnership 
relation in the land as between the landlord and 
tenant. This traditional, elementary, and wide- 
embracing principle of our common jurispru- 
dence once set aside as to land tenure in any one 
particular, it is easy to imagine that the prece- 
dent thus set might be pushed as occasion re- 
quired to the length of restoring the soil to its 
original communal ownership. Such a retro- 
gression to primitive ideas is certainly not a result 
to be desired. It would mean, indeed, nothing 
less than the utter destruction of our entire 
scheme of civilization. We would here repeat 
only what in substance we have before urged, 
that when the matter of land monopoly becomes 
noxious and glaring enough to awaken the peo- 
ple to a proper sense of their duty, their inherent 
right of self-preservation will be asserted, even 



DANGERS FROM WITHIN 83 

to the extent, if thought necessary, of enforcing 
the Georgian drastic confiscation projects or 
some other measures equally deep-cutting and 
wide-sweeping in their purpose and effect. 

It may be well to say in this connection that 
we do not seek to ignore or evade the fact that 
concentration of capital and effort, and that, too, 
often upon a vast scale, is an indispensable pre- 
requisite to human progress, if not indeed to the 
very existence of society itself. But for such 
concentration, we should to-day most probably 
have had no railroads, no steamships, no tele- 
graphs; many of our more elaborate manufac- 
tures would have been unknown ; our vast mining 
interests would yet in great measures have re- 
mained undeveloped; in a word, we should still 
be groping our slow lengths along in the hope- 
less gloom of barbarism. Nor do we here over- 
look the further important fact, that, while 
business and industrial enterprises of great 
magnitude undoubtedly tend to aggrandize the 
few, the effect — whatever may have been the 
motive — is likewise in some measure to better 
the many. If Vanderbilt, as suggested by 
Edward Atkinson, the eminent Boston statisti- 
cian — "reduced the cost of moving a barrel of 
flour a thousand miles from a dollar and a half 



84 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

to fifty cents," he should in so far at least be 
considered a public benefactor, even if he did at 
the same time thereby help himself to the extent 
of a hundred millions or more. For "what he 
made — " to quote again from Mr. Atkinson — 
"was but a tithe of what he made for the 
community." 

While admitting all this, however, we can- 
not help thinking parenthetically in the same 
breath of another apropos consideration of 
Froude's, which is to be found in this author's 
admirable study On Progress already quoted 
from. It is a consideration which applies as well 
to Vanderbilt's millions expended in princely 
luxury and ostentation as to that which the noted 
English writer had immediately in mind, and as 
well to extravagant expenditures in gorgeous 
churches and other public edifices as to like in- 
dulgences for private or personal gratification. 

"The economists," says the authority mentioned, "insist 
that the growth of artificial wants among the few is one of 
the symptoms of civilization — is a means provided by 
nature to spread abroad the superfluities of the great. If 
the same labor, however, which is now expended in decorat- 
ing and furnishing a Belgravian palace was laid out upon 
the cottages on the estates of its owner, an equal number 
of workmen would find employment, an equal fraction of 



DANGERS FROM WITHIN 85 

the landlord's income would be divided in wages. For the 
economist's own purposes, the luxury could be dispensed 
with if the landlord took a different view of his obligations. 
Progress and civilization conceal the existence of his obliga- 
tions and destroy at the same time the old-fashioned 
customs which limited the sphere of his free will. The 
great estates have eaten up the lean. The same owner 
holds properties in a dozen counties. He cannot reside on 
them all, or make personal acquaintance with his multiplied 
dependents. He has several country residences. He lives 
in London half the year, and most of the rest upon the 
Continent. Inevitably he comes to regard his land as an 
investment; his duty to it the development of its produc- 
ing powers; the receipt of his rents as the essence of the 
connection; and his personal interest in it the sport which it 
will provide for himself and his friends. Modern land- 
lords tell us that if the game laws are abolished, they will 
have lost the last temptation to visit their country seats. 
If this is their view of the matter, the sooner they sell their 
estates and pass them over to others, the better it will be 
for the community. They complain of the growth of 
democracy and insubordination. The fault is wholly in 
themselves. They have lost the respect of the people 
because they have ceased to deserve it." 

Yet, on the other hand, it may be — as Mr. 
Mallock's Science of Society would have it — 
that to take from a Vanderbilt, a Carnegie, or 
the owner of the "Belgravian palace" the motive 
to eclipse his fellows in the pomp and glitter of 
wealth and social pretension, we should have no 



86 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

accumulated millions to expend either in reduc- 
ing the cost of the necessaries and comforts of 
life, or for the luxuries to satisfy the vanities of 
the rich. Indeed, the more the problem is studied 
the more complicated and far-reaching becomes 
its conditions and the more are we impressed 
with the wisdom of desisting from hasty conclu- 
sions and rashly conceived measures. 

The centralization of business and capital, 
from the consideration of which we digressed a 
moment ago, should be regarded from still 
another point of view. George Gunton, one of 
the more clear-sighted thinkers that the present 
protracted agitation of this class of subjects has 
brought to notice, lays it down as a fundamental 
principle, that consumable wealth is most abun- 
dantly produced and most generally distributed 
among the masses in proportion as the use of 
productive wealth (capital) is concentrated. He 
further affirms it as a generalization deduced 
from reliable statistics, that in proportion as this 
principle comes into play, there is a correspond- 
ing increase both in the productive capacity per 
capita and the income per capita, as well as in 
the rate of wages, of the community concerned. 
For instance: "In this country (the United 
States) and in England, where the concentration 



DANGERS FROM WITHIN 87 

of capital is the greatest in the world, the pro- 
ductive capacity per capita is nearly two and 
a half times that of the average in continental 
countries, five times as large as that of Italy, 
Spain, and Portugal, and twelve times that of 
China and India; and the income per capita is 
about thirteen times as great as that of India 
and China, six times that of Italy, Spain, and 
Portugal, and more than twice that of the aver- 
age on the European Continent ; and the general 
rate of wages in England is about ten times that 
of Asia and nearly double that of Continental 
Europe; while in this country it is about fifteen 
times that of Asia, and within a fraction of three 
times that of the average on the Continent." It 
will be observed, in passing, that it is accumu- 
lated wealth devoted to production, and not 
to the idle purposes pointed out above by 
Mr. Froude, that is here discussed as contribut- 
ing to the general comfort and happiness. 

But in this matter, perhaps, as in most other 
matters, there exists somewhere a golden mean 
beyond which a virtue may be pushed till it be- 
comes a vice. In the present instance, it may be 
suggested that such golden mean is likely to 
be found at that point where competition has 
stimulated enterprise up to the maximum of 



88 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

healthy development, and has not been pressed 
so far as to assume the character of monopoly. 
The same reasoning would seem to hold in this 
feature of economics that Alexander Hamilton 
applied to civil and religious rights. "In a free 
government," writes this genius, matchless as a 
statesman and political philosopher, "the security 
for civil rights must be the same as that for 
religious rights. It consists in the one case in 
the multiplication of interests, and in the other 
in the multiplication of sects. The degree of 
security in both cases, will depend upon the 
number of interests and sects." Obviously, a 
despotism may grow out of industrial conditions 
no less rigorous and searching than out of civil, 
political, or religious conditions. To strike at 
one's right to acquire food, and clothing, and 
fuel, and shelter, is to strike at his most vital 
concerns. To insure an even-handed chance for 
the enjoyment of this right, no stronger guar- 
antee could be found than that resulting from a 
"multiplicity of interests," and the wholesome, 
chastening, live-and-let-live influence which is 
thus produced. 

Another aspect of the sociological problem 
may be studied with profit. It is that of the 
force or value of law as a reforming agency. A 



DANGERS FROM WITHIN 89 

writer, already cited approvingly, lays great 
stress upon the principle "that political institu- 
tions are not the cause but the consequence of 
the industrial conditions and social character of 
the masses." Thus, "instead of regarding our 
social evils as the result of our political institu- 
tions," we should recognize the fact that "it is 
only by improving the industrial conditions and 
elevating the social character of the masses that 
we can maintain the integrity of our democratic 
institutions." In the recognition of this doctrine 
and the enforcement of its teachings, it is held, 
lies the best, if not the only, protection that the 
workingman and the masses generally can hope 
for. Less hours of work and thus more hours 
for culture is the surest guarantee for a higher 
rate of wages ; for the price of labor is fixed, not 
so much by the law of supply and demand, as by 
the social and intellectual attainments of the 
wage-worker himself. Political quacks, like 
medical quacks, prescribe a ready nostrum for 
every ill; but the true office of law, as of medi- 
cine, is to seek to assist nature, and not to create it 
anew. Intelligent prescription as well as the 
measure of results, will depend in either case 
entirely upon the nature and the condition of 
the subject operated upon. It is not contended, 



90 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

indeed, that governmental interference is a mat- 
ter of indifferent concern in this connection. 
For by adjusting the burdens upon a fair and 
equitable basis; by keeping down taxes to the 
actual public needs; by maintaining an honest 
and efficient civil service ; by affording equal and 
adequate protection to all persons in the enjoy- 
ment of liberty and property; by encouraging 
and promoting the cause of mental and moral 
education, — by these and various other means 
government may do much in the way of advanc- 
ing the general weal. But if there is any 
principle or doctrine in the consensus of socio- 
logical science that is clearly and firmly settled — 
that bears upon it the stamp of the highest 
authority from the days of Solon to the present 
time, it is that the character of political institu- 
tions is the true sign and measure of the character 
of the people concerned ; from which fact follows 
the obvious corollary, that to reform the political 
life, the process must begin by reforming the 
people first. We cannot, therefore, too often 
or too strenuously insist upon the vital truth 
before quoted from the eminent Catholic ecclesi- 
astic, "that the end of popular government is not 
to make a country rich and populous, but to 
establish morality as the basis of life and law." 



POLITICS AND MORALITY 



VI. 

POLITICS AND MORALITY. 

TT HE moral phase in politics here touched upon 
suggests much that should invite serious 
reflection. That there is generally an excep- 
tional laxness in this direction, is a fact too 
palpable to be questioned. Mr. Lecky, in his 
brilliant and scholarly History of European 
Morals, has adverted to such prostitution of the 
political conscience. "The moral standard of 
most men," he says, "is much lower in political 
judgments than in private matters where their 
own interests are concerned. There is nothing 
more common than for men who in private life 
are models of the most scrupulous integrity to 
justify or excuse the most flagrant acts of dis- 
honesty and violence, and we should be altogether 
mistaken if we argued rigidly from such ap- 
provals to the general moral sentiments of those 
who utter them." If, for instance, in this 
country we should accept as an index of the 
general morals of the people the half -indifferent, 

[93] 



94 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

half-apologetic spirit in which the Oak Ameses, 
the Belknaps, the "Whiskey Crooks" and the 
hordes of other political offenders, great and 
small, have been looked upon and dealt with, we 
should certainly make a pitiable showing to the 
world as a cultured and Christian nation. One 
good, however, may result from this untoward 
state of things: it may lead to the exercise of 
greater caution and wisdom in drawing the line 
between the business that properly belongs to 
the State and the business that belongs to private 
enterprise. 

Probably one of the most common and most 
reprehensible forms in which such default or 
perversion of the moral faculty appears, is seen 
in the personal and mercenary abuses which it is 
made to subserve. To one at all versed in the 
ways of politics in its narrowest and less laudable 
sense, an almost infinite number and variety of 
illustrations will suggest themselves in this con- 
nection. Among these, several may be noted as 
sufficiently serving our present purpose. 

First, take the so-called Internal Improvement 
schemes. There was a period in the history of 
this country when the question of policy involved 
in this subject constituted a leading issue between 
the two great political parties. Not so to-day, 



POLITICS AND MORALITY 95 

by any means. So far from it, the apostles of 
every sort of party affiliation who seek to profit 
by such projects outvie each other in striving 
thus to secure the biggest "grab" from the public 
treasury. The average member of Congress is 
not at all insensible of the fact that a generous 
provision in the Appropriation bill to be applied 
in his district will go a long way in his favor at 
the succeeding general election, the actual public 
benefits to accrue from the expenditure, if cut- 
ting any figure at all, being quite an incidental 
and remote consideration in the premises. Hence 
the amount of "log-rolling" * that is practiced 

* "Log-rolling" is an exchange of favors. Representative A. 
is very anxious to secure a grant for the clearing of a small 
water-course in his district, and representative B. is equally 
solicitous about his plans for bringing money into the hands of 
the contractors of his own constituency, whilst representative C. 
comes from a seaport town whose modest harbor is neglected 
because of the treacherous bar across its mouth, and representa- 
tive D. has been blamed for not bestirring himself more in the 
interest of schemes of improvement afoot amongst the enter- 
prising citizens of his native place; so it is perfectly feasible for 
these gentlemen to put their heads together and confirm a mutual 
understanding that each will vote in Committee of the Whole for 
the grants desired by the others, in consideration of the promise 
that they will cry "aye" when his item comes on to be considered. 
It is not out of the question to gain the favoring ear of the 
reporting Committee, and a great deal of tinkering can be done 
with the bill after it has come into the hands of the House. 
Lobbying and log-rolling go hand in hand. 



96 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

behind the scenes in the furtherance of such 
projects would astound and put to blush the 
uninitiated in the mysteries of legislative pro- 
cedure, could they be brought to realize its fre- 
quency and its magnitude. Thus are the bills 
for the alleged improvement of rivers and har- 
bors in the interest of navigation and commerce 
usually loaded down with sham propositions one 
after another till the original measure is dis- 
torted out of all semblance of symmetry or even 
of decency. 

The pension system affords another tempting 
field for the debasement of the politician and of 
politics, because of the wide facilities it offers 
for the subsidizing and debauching of voters. 
As to the pension system in itself considered, we 
need not here be told that the people of this 
country always turn with grateful hearts and a 
free and open hand towards the men who sprang 
to the defense of the nation in its hour of dire 
extremity. The fact that our annual budget for 
this purpose has run up year after year till it is 
said now to exceed the entire cost of the military 
department of any nation on the globe, affords 
evidence enough upon this point. But what the 
people have reason to complain of, and what 
they do complain of, is the questionable motive 



POLITICS AND MORALITY 97 

which too often lies behind this lavish expendi- 
ture. Few persons, we may imagine, are so 
obtuse or so deluded as for one moment to 
believe that the extraordinary zeal and activity 
displayed by Congress and the pension bureau 
just upon the eve of a congressional and perhaps 
a presidential election, are prompted purely by 
the bubbling over of a generous, grateful, patri- 
otic spirit. What aggravates the matter still 
more is the evident fact that no semblance of 
proper discrimination between the worthy and 
the unworthy can possibly be regarded in any 
such promiscuous, helter-skelter raids upon the 
general treasury for corrupt and selfish ends. 
But it is a long lane that has no turn. Human 
forbearance has its limit. The only thing to be 
deplored in this case is, that when the day of 
reckoning comes, as come it certainly will sooner 
or later, the good may be doomed to suffer along 
with the bad. 

In the same category belong commercial 
monopolies and the various favored interests 
which by grace of partial tariff legislation are 
enabled to feather their nests by plucking the 
public. The beneficiaries of this system of 
spoliation are so all-powerful in controlling the 
purse-strings, subsidizing the organs of public 



98 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

opinion, and plying the bread and butter argu- 
ment upon the dependent voter, to say nothing 
of their immense leverage in a social way, that 
they combine to make up a political force which 
is well-nigh irresistible at the ballot-box. The 
candidate for public preferment who dares to 
champion the cause of the people in the face of 
such mighty combinations is well aware that as 
a rule he can count upon reaping his only glory 
in coming out of the contest unwept and unsung. 
Let, for instance, a Morrison, a Carlisle, or any 
other gifted and courageous member of Congress 
show a disposition to antagonize these protected 
interests, and then observe with what gloating 
zeal and relentless savagery these pampered 
favorites will dog the heels of such congressman, 
should he appear before his constituents for re- 
election. 

The tariff system itself from its peculiar 
nature invites abuses. In the first place, the 
system is unjust. The whole burden falls on 
consumption and none on property. As the 
amount one consumes bears no necessary corre- 
spondence to the amount of property one owns, 
the rich pay, on the average, out of all semblance 
of just proportion less of the taxes than the poor. 
In the second place, the system rests upon 



POLITICS AND MORALITY 99 

deception. The tax is confounded with the price 
of the commodity, and is paid in the first 
instance by the importer and not by the pur- 
chaser or consumer. By this circumvention the 
consumer is unable to discover how much tax he 
pays or how, when, or where he pays it. This 
mode of beating about the bush is not a new one. 
More than eighteen centuries ago we find a 
striking precedent. It is related, for instance, 
"that Nero had abolished the duty of the five- 
and-twentieth part arising from the sale of 
slaves; and yet he had only ordained that it 
should be paid by the seller instead of the pur- 
chaser. This regulation, which left the im- 
port entire, seemed nevertheless to suppress it." 
Though we might imagine this sort of statecraft 
to be quite befitting a Nero and the time in 
which he lived, yet we should hardly be prepared 
to reconcile such tactics with our lofty claims 
to culture in this the closing decade of the boasted 
nineteenth century. Certainly no right-minded 
person would complain of contributing his 
proper proportion for the support of govern- 
ment; but he has a right to know, and ought to 
know, and should demand to know, precisely the 
amount he pays and the way he pays it. Yet, 
strange to say, this Neroian artifice, this patent 



100 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

imposture, still almost universally passes cur- 
rent for sound statesmanship and is even widely 
looked upon, not as a makeshift to be discarded 
when public sentiment becomes ripe for some- 
thing better, but as a positive good * to be 
extolled and indefinitely continued. 

The protective element adds still further 
objection to the system; for in this case the evils 
complained of extend not only to the imported 
article, but to the domestic as well. As the great 
bulk of interests cannot profit by embargoes 
upon imports, the effect of such restrictions is to 
favor certain interests with special advantages 
over the others. "No tariff which the United 
States imposed could, for instance, encourage 
the growth of grain or cotton, the raising of 
cattle, the production of coal oil, or the mining 
of gold or silver; for instead of importing these 
things, we not only supply ourselves but have a 
surplus which we export. Nor could any import 
duty encourage any of the many industries 
which must be carried on where needed, such as 

* John A. Kasson in The Forum, Dec. 1887 : "You tell me that I 
am fearfully burdened by my share of the customs taxation, say 
$250,000,000. Perhaps I am, but I do not feel it; I do not know 
it; for I cannot feel it. No visible collector calls on me for it, 
and my books take no account of it. If I die, no claim is made 
for it against my children or my estate." 



POLITICS AND MORALITY 101 

building, horseshoeing, the printing of news- 
papers, and so on. Since these industries that 
cannot be protected constitute by far the larger 
part of the industries of any country, the utmost 
that by tariff legislation can be attempted is the 
encouragement of only a few of the total in- 
dustries of a country." To introduce direct 
bounties or other devices so as to put all interests 
upon a level in this respect, would be to put a 
speedy end to protection altogether; for, dis- 
guise the fact as we will, that inequality in 
legislative favoritism by which the strong and 
the crafty hope to ride into wealth and promi- 
nence upon the backs of their less fortunate or 
less unscrupulous fellows is the main-stay and 
prime motive-force of the whole protectionist 
scheme. 

Yet we are to deal with conditions as we find 
them, and not as we would have them. As we 
have said, the system of customs taxation is the 
accepted policy of the country, and we cannot 
hope for immediate or radical changes. The 
people will bear no such thing, and no political 
party, whatever it may profess, will, when put 
to the test, venture upon the experiment. Sev- 
eral suggestions, however, seem eminently per- 
tinent and timely in this connection. 



102 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

First — Let it be recognized that the tariff is a 
tax, and that by no possible sort of subtlety or 
jugglery can it be made anything but a tax. We 
should then have less over-plethoric accumula- 
tions in the national coffers to breed debauchery, 
extravagance, and rapacity, and to lead in the 
end to financial panic and general business dis- 
aster. We should then, for instance, hear less 
talk of such wild schemes as that of distributing 
the surplus national revenues among the several 
States instead of lowering the taxes to prevent 
such excesses, or as that of converting the Gov- 
ernment into a sort of pawnshop where certain 
industrial classes might obtain loans at low rates 
upon lands or chattels pledged as security. 

Secondly — Let it be seen to that public taxa- 
tion be for public purposes only. To insist upon 
this maxim would be to divert the business of 
government from the fostering of private enter- 
prises at the public expense, to strip the lobby 
of much of its corrupting occupation, and thus 
to infuse into our political policy some of the 
ingredients of common sense and common 
decency. 

Thirdly — Let luxuries, not necessaries, bear 
the burden. In this the revenue system of Great 
Britain is much nearer to a rational basis than 



POLITICS AND MORALITY 103 

ours. There the customs duty is at present con- 
fined chiefly to spirits and wine, tobacco and tea, 
these producing for the year 1888-89 nearly 
nineteen-twentieths of the whole amount. The 
excise tax largely exceeds the customs. The 
items of intoxicants and tobacco, with the cus- 
toms duties on the same, contribute more than 
fifty per cent, of the national income. The 
income tax ranks third in the list in productive- 
ness, making nearly sixteen per cent, of the 
total.* 

In this country for the same financial year 
the receipts from customs constituted nearly 
seven-twelfths of our whole revenue, and the 
bulk of this duty we know is laid upon what are 
called necessaries. An income tax was imposed 
during the period of the Rebellion; but while the 

* Ely, Taxation in American States and Cities: "Taxation tends 
to diffuse itself, but on the line of least resistance. Now, the line 
of least resistance is found among the poor, the line of great 
resistance among the rich; whereas the line of moderate resistance 
will be found among people of moderate circumstances. . . . 
Tax-assessors fear to assess the wealthy, as they do the poor, 
because the wealthy have great power to harm or help one. In 
no place in the United States are the wealthy properly 
assessed. . . . This does not imply that any one class is either 
better or worse than another. It is a question of the power of 
resistance. The poor people and the people in moderate cir- 
cumstances would often be but too glad to imitate conduct which 
they condemn, had they the power." 



104 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

war rate has been maintained on imports, the 
income tax was the first to be repealed upon the 
return of peace. The explanation of the latter 
fact is readily apparent. The tax was direct; 
there could be no question as to who paid it; it 
fell chiefly upon the well-to-do and influential 
classes; hence its short lease of life.* A grad- 
uated income tax, if judiciously planned and 
coupled with a like graduated tax upon land, 
would certainly operate as a wholesome check 
upon the inordinate concentration of wealth. 
But for the same reason that the income act 
which we did have was so short lived, it would 
be difficult to return to a similar policy and if 
adopted difficult to maintain it. The subject, if 
again mooted, will, therefore, most likely be 
approached with a cautious, gingerly hand. The 
legislator, like most other men, very naturally 

* Whitaker's Almanack (London), 1890: "All modern Chan- 
cellors have found this elastic (Income) tax most useful; it is so 
productive and withal so easily managed; should any emergency 
arise a penny can be put on; a war scare — two pence; more 
ships — three pence. The great mass of the public never complain 
of its being too heavy; the tax does not reach them; in point of 
fact they like to see an addition. In principle the tax is fair, 
but there are too many evasions, and but few artisans, whatever 
their earnings, contribute to it at all. The lowest income ever 
touched (in England) is 150 pounds, and on incomes below 400 
pounds, a deduction of 120 pounds is made." 



POLITICS AND MORALITY 105 

looks much more to expediency than to principle. 
As Buckle has put it, "In the present state of 
knowledge, politics, so far from being a science, 
is the most backward of all the arts; and the 
only safe course for the legislator is, to look upon 
his craft as consisting in the adaptation of tem- 
porary contrivances to temporary emergencies." 
In the matter of state finance, the officials 
charged with this department observe that a 
certain estimated expenditure is to be met, and 
that method which is likely to provoke the least 
resistance is that which will be adopted, with little 
if any regard to other considerations. For this 
reason import duties and other indirect and dis- 
guised forms of taxation meet with continued 
popular favor.* 

Next and lastly, a brief reference to the state 
of our civil service. To begin with, it is perhaps 
hardly too much to say of this that the virus of 
the "spoils system" permeates and defiles our 
politics through all its ramifications from its 
central seat at Washington down to the village 
ward caucus. Its general debasing effects are 
too well and too generally understood to need 
specific explanation or comment. What atten- 
tion we can give the subject here must be 

* Morgan, Ancient Society, ch. iii. 



106 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

confined to a passing glance at its operations at 
its head centre, at the national capital. The 
facts we would present have been so tersely and 
forcefully set forth by Senator George F. 
Edmunds in a recent magazine article that we 
can do no better than to reproduce for our con- 
templation a sample paragraph from his perti- 
nent and timely utterances.* He says: 

"The mercenary greed of office, the corruption of the 
electors and the falsification of returns are very closely 
allied. The first is very likely to produce the others. As 
selfishness and ambition are innate qualities of the human 
mind, it cannot be expected that the thirst for the power 
and profits of place will ever be much diminished, but its 
gratification can be repressed in just the proportion that the 
moral sense of the people in regard to elective offices, and 
that of the appointing power in respect of the other offices, 
can be roused into firm and vigorous exercise. Taking the 
country all together, it can be safely affirmed that the 
people in the election of their own officers protect them- 
selves in this respect to a greater degree, in proportion, 
than those selecting the appointive officers have been so 
far enabled to do. After every election in which a presi- 
dent, or governor, or other officer having the power of 

* "The experience of four thousand years should enlarge our 
hopes and diminish our apprehensions;" for "every age of the 
world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the hap- 
piness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human 
race." — Gibbon's Roman Empire, ch. xxxviii. 



POLITICS AND MORALITY 107 

patronage is chosen, the pressure upon each and all of 
them, by and in favor of political workers, for immediate 
appointment, is far greater than those not having the 
immediate personal means of knowledge can well imagine. 
A great part of the time of a president and his heads of 
department, that needs to be given to public matters of 
general importance, is absorbed in deciding between the 
conflicting demands of many political workers for places 
that all together do not amount to one-tenth of the number 
of applicants, each one of whom is disappointed that he has 
not been taken before all Ins fellows. And all are pleased 
in common if any old incumbent, no matter how perfectly 
he may be discharging the duties of his office, no matter 
how steadily he may have refrained from 'pernicious 
activity,' no matter how high his character, no matter how 
well the public interest is promoted by his service, is 
at once dismissed, in order that each one of the claimants 
may compete for the prize of the vacancy. We have had 
brave declarations of virtue and good intentions on tins 
subject from all political parties for some years, but the 
performance has, so far, fallen shamefully short of such 
professions. Indeed, these promises and declarations have 
been treated, after elections, with ribald and systematic 
contempt. Nobody in a republic is or should be in favor 
of an office-holding class ; but as the great bulk of the small 
administrative employments are those involving no policy 
of government, and merely call for the exercise of partic- 
ular and strictly-defined business work, it is difficult to 
suggest upon what ground they should be treated differently 
from other business employments in the country, in respect 
of which the question of the political opinions of those 



108 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

employed is almost never heard of. It would be an aston- 
ishing spectacle, and one everybody would condemn, if 
at every change of directors in a great railroad or manu- 
facturing corporation, all the station-agents, engineers, 
line-men, and operatives should be dismissed, in order to 
make places for successors whose political or other opinions 
were supposed to be like those of the new board of 
directors. The business of the government is of common 
interest to every one of its citizens, and to be successful it 
must be conducted upon the same principles and by the 
same general methods that are found to be wise and 
adequate in private affairs; and in these the man would be 
thought demented who should maintain that the views of 
the station-agents or engineers, or factory workmen on the 
subject of protection, or woman suffrage, or any other of 
the questions of public consideration, make them any more 
or less fitted for or entitled to employment." 

President Cleveland, in entering upon the 
duties of the chief magistracy of the Nation, 
certainly set out upon the right road and in the 
right spirit. That "Public office is a public 
trust" is a political maxim the soundness of 
which cannot be successfully questioned. That 
Mr. Cleveland did not better succeed in applying 
this maxim to the condition of affairs he found 
at Washington was, we believe it is now gen- 
erally conceded, more the fault of the vitiated 
party sentiment of the time than of the purity 
of purpose on the part of the Chief Executive. 



POLITICS AND MORALITY 109 

"Public office is a party perquisite!" is the rank 
and rotten maxim of party ethics with which the 
presidential office had to contend. It is encour- 
aging, however, to note as one of the healthful 
signs of the times, that Mr. Cleveland's adminis- 
tration, in spite of all the embarrassments under 
which it labored, did make some real, substantial 
progress in the way of abating the crying 
abominations of the "spoils system," and that the 
present administration has also conceived it 
feasible and expedient to follow up in some 
measure the advantages which had been thus 
secured. Nothing indeed ought more to com- 
mend President Harrison to the favor and 
gratitude of all right-minded citizens than the 
denunciation that he has invited and that he has 
received from the army of voracious spoils- 
seekers because of his refusal to do their whole 
bidding. It is, moreover, to be most earnestly 
hoped for and prayed for that the virtue and 
intelligence of the people themselves, who in 
truth have no real interest in politics apart from 
a wise and economical administration of govern- 
ment, will suffer no backward step to be taken 
on this question. Put no spoilsman on guard! — 
let this henceforth be the watchword and talisman 
of the people, first, last, and in every event. 



110 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

The shortcomings in our public service are 
indeed obvious enough and vicious enough to be 
readily discovered and heartily abominated; but 
where rests the responsibility for their existence ? 
It is easy enough to cudgel the legislator and the 
party wire-puller; but are these really the only 
classes to blame ? Do we not claim that ours is a 
"government of the people by the people" and 
if such it is in fact, are not the people themselves 
rather than their public servants primarily to 
blame? If we like to be humbugged, as the 
prince of American showman is said once to have 
told us we did, why there will always be found 
plenty of tricksters to practice the art upon us to 
our hearts' content. As pointed out in that sug- 
gestive little book, Reforms: Their Difficulties 
cmd Possibilities, the man in public station has 
really very little choice as to the course he may 
pursue, if he would retain his place as against 
others less scrupulous than himself, and not have 
undone what his judgment and his conscience 
might have prompted him to do. To quote the 
trenchant words of this authority : 

"A young statesman soon discovers that the open, honest 
advocacy of really just measures would render him unpop- 
ular and drive him from public life. The people are not 
always just to their benefactors because they do not always 



POLITICS AND MORALITY ill 

clearly discriminate who their benefactors are. For this 
reason, honest service in behalf of the people is not at all 
certain to meet its proper reward. Hence, our young 
'statesman' allies himself with those intelligent and power- 
ful class interests which are more apt to reward service 
and which control the means of creating public sentiment. 
It is only in this direction, that he can be sure of a substan- 
tial reputation and steady political preferment. It does 
not matter if by birth and education he belongs to the great 
body of the people; there is shoddy in politics as well as in 
social life. The politician must study the drift of the 
strong interests and adapt himself. If such drift requires 
the sacrifice of weaker classes, he must adapt himself none 
the less. For his ends — success and power — it is far better 
to go along with the deceived many than to be right with 
the discerning few. No high-toned character with deep 
convictions can be a successful politician ; he only can be 
who has no such convictions t A fairly honest man in 
politics must often find himself compelled to act on policy 
when he would prefer to act on principle. It is a common 
observation that the best men are kept out of politics. Thus 
it is shown, both by the character of parties and politicians, 
that interest is too strong for equity. This is not always 
true of individuals, but it is always true of parties and 
classes. A class or party confounds interest with patriot- 
ism ; it always gets what it can, and keeps all it gets ; and, 
if it defers to the rights of others, it is only to get more." 



THE PEOPLE AND SELF- 
GOVERNMENT 



VII. 

THE PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT. 

JTROM what has been said of the lack on the 
part of the people in properly discerning 
their interests, holding their public servants to 
account, and extending encouragement to meri- 
torious motive and effort, it may appear to cast 
grave discredit upon the principle of self-govern- 
ment itself when considered as a concrete, prac- 
tical entity. A little closer attention to the 
facts, however, will, it is thought, serve largely 
to dispel any such feeling of distrust if enter- 
tained. 

That a free polity is the best under all cir- 
cumstances and conditions is a proposition which 
is not indeed for a moment to be entertained. 
When Solon was asked if the laws he had given 
the Athenians were the best, he replied, "I have 
given them the best they were able to bear." 
The great law-giver thus laid down a maxim for 
the guidance of statesmen which through all the 
centuries since he flourished has never been 
improved upon. Herbert Spencer but pushes 

[115] 



116 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

this sociological principle a little further where 
he maintains "that the genesis, the maintenance, 
and the decline of all governments, however 
named, are alike brought about by the humanity 
to be controlled"; and "that, on the average, 
restrictions of every kind cannot last much 
longer than they are wanted, and cannot be 
destroyed much faster than they ought to be." 
We are to infer, therefore, that the usual senti- 
mentality expended in behalf of "the down- 
trodden of other lands" is sheer waste of sym- 
pathy. Nations will become free about as soon 
as they are fitted for freedom, and no sooner, 
whatever we may say or do to hasten them. 
Montesquieu, indeed, declares that "Liberty 
itself has appeared intolerable to those nations 
who have not been accustomed to enjoy it," and 
there is not wanting ample historical warrant to 
support such a declaration. When upon the 
accession of one of the Russian empresses, it was 
proposed somewhat to limit her authority, the 
people protested. "Let her be an autocrat like 
her predecessors," was the vehement outcry with 
which the proposal was greeted. "The table was 
prepared," as one of the liberal princes in deep 
humiliation put it, "but the guests were not 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 117 

worthy." Several of the successors of this 
empress set out in their respective reigns with 
liberal ideas and liberal purposes, but soon found 
themselves constrained to fall back upon the 
bare despotism to which the people were accus- 
tomed. The several attempts at establishing 
constitutional government in Spain met with 
like speedy disaster. The flame of liberty there 
flickered above the horizon for a day, when it 
was summarily snuffed out by the hands of those 
for whom it had been kindled. Even in the so- 
called Republic of France, about which we are 
prone to make so much ado, it is not inaptly said 
that "new democracy is old despotism differently 
spelt." The outward show is there, not the 
inward reality. Still, such aversion to change is 
not perhaps, after all, to be scouted as an 
unmixed evil, as it tends to preserve that balance 
of power between extremes, which is the main- 
stay and sheet-anchor of society. If Russia had 
not despotism, she would have anarchy. In 
France the imperial sub-structure upon which 
the republican framework is superimposed, is 
the nation's strongest safeguard against like 
danger. In most of the States of Europe indeed 
it is the moral force of the mailed hand known 



118 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

to abide about the throne that serves to preserve 
political autonomy and public order. The 
Spanish American States have affected our 
democratic clothes ; but, never having been trained 
in the democratic fashion, they cut a sorry enough 
figure in trying to wear them. 

The truth is, the instinct of the masses is very 
conservative. As Mr. Bagehot has expressed it, 
a new idea is painful to the most of them, so 
much easier is it to tread along in the old well- 
worn ruts than to blaze out new paths. Progress 
is at best a slow and tedious process. It has been 
estimated, for instance, that man spent three- 
fifths of the period of his existence on the earth 
in groping his way out of the status of savagery. 
The process, even in the most advanced societies 
of to-day, is still slow and gradual, never by 
sudden leaps and bounds, and always upon the 
prolongation of the lines of prior development. 
The initiative of most reforms comes from 
above, and not from below. "The sun illumi- 
nates the hills while it is yet below the horizon; 
and truth is discovered by the higher minds a 
little before it is manifest to the multitude." 
Thus was it as to the struggle between Chris- 
tianity and Paganism in the earlier ages of our 
era. And coming down later and nearer home, 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 119 

Mr. Lecky would have us believe that if a vote 
had been taken at any time during the first years 
of our Revolution the result would have shown 
a decided preference on the part of the Colonies 
to abandon the cause of Independence and re- 
sume their allegiance to the British Crown. The 
same spirit of conservatism was also observable 
in the feeling with respect to our Civil War. It 
was the leaders on either side, not the people at 
large, that brought about the conflict. So also 
as regards general improvements. Sir Henry 
Maine is certain that, "if for four centuries there 
had been (in England) a very large electoral 
body, . . . there would have been no reforma- 
tion of religion, no change of dynasty, no 
toleration of Dissent, not even an accurate 
Calendar. The threshing-machine, the power- 
loom, the spinning- jenny, and possibly the 
steam-engine would have been prohibited, . . . 
and we may say generally," this author goes on 
to assert, "that the gradual establishment of the 
masses in power is of the blackest omen for all 
legislation founded on scientific opinion, which 
requires tension of mind to understand it and 
self-denial to submit to it." * 

•Green's English People, ch. i; Stubb's Const. Hist, of Eng. 
i. 48. 



120 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

But it is comforting to know that, after all 
that can be said of the stubborn conservatism of 
the masses, the patent fact remains that in all 
Anglo-Saxon countries there has been genuine, 
verifiable progress, and that every succeeding 
moment is still being signalized by new and 
important triumphs in the cause of civilization. 
Already in these Anglo-Saxon countries have 
the people become the ruling power of the State. 
"No one now dares talk of bridling the people, 
or of resisting their united wishes," says Buckle. 
"The utmost that can be said is, that efforts 
should be made to inform them of their interests, 
and enlighten public opinion; but every one 
allows that, so soon as public opinion is formed, 
it can no longer be withstood." A little atten- 
tion to history upon this point will enable us 
the better to interpret the conditions we have 
thus evolved, and, when comprehending their 
import, the more wisely to direct their tendency. 
Going back, then, to the earliest records, we find 
the politics of our Aryan ancestors democratical, 
but of course measurably unregulated and un- 
restrained by the force of law. An elective chief, 
a council, and an assembly composed of all the 
freemen of the community were the cardinal 
elements of the polity which these people 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 121 

brought with them to Europe from their original 
homes; and these elements they carried with 
them wherever they thereafter went. Infinitely 
modified as varied and varying circumstances 
and conditions have required, these original 
political germs have continued to form the 
groundwork of Aryan polities down to this day. 
The germs of monarchy and of aristocracy are 
discernible in political organisms from the first; 
but, as Mr. Freeman suggests, beyond these 
nascent forms there was an armed and free 
people in whom the ultimate sovereignty unques- 
tionably resided. From the chief, the council, 
and the popular assembly there sprang, respec- 
tively, as direct lineal descendants, the Kings, 
Lords, and Commons of the English Constitu- 
tion; and from these latter estates, in turn, were 
borrowed the President, Senate, and House of 
the American Constitution. The judicial func- 
tion as a co-ordinate branch is a later differentia- 
tion. Though the germs of the representative 
system may be traced, as Green and Stubbs point 
out, to quite remote times, yet as a practical 
working device of government the contrivance 
was wholly unknown to the ancients. When the 
democratic machinery failed them, they had no 
known alternative but the rule of the one or the 



122 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

few and the subjection of the many. According 
to M. Guizot, it is not until the thirteenth cen- 
tury, and then only in England, that a "real and 
positive instance" of the use of the scheme of 
representation is discoverable. 

As political integration went on by the com- 
pounding and recompounding of the smaller 
social aggregates with the larger — as the gens 
into the tribe and the tribes into the confederacy 
or State — the popular assembly fell into disuse 
by reason of its unwieldiness and the burden it 
imposed in consequence of the great distance 
many of its members would be required to 
journey to the place of the periodical moots or 
meetings. The germ of royalty resided in the 
chief, as the germs of aristocracy resided in the 
council, and these monarchical elements con- 
stantly grew at the expense of the democratic 
element until, in Rome under the Caesars, and 
later throughout the Teutonic nations under the 
dominance of the feudal chiefs, the people 
almost wholly disappeared as a factor of govern- 
ment. Mr. Bagehot tells in a few pithy words 
how the ancient popular principle came to be 
revived in the English Constitution through the 
rise of the Commons as the dominant branch 
of Parliament — how, successively, "the slavish 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 123 

Parliament of Henry VIII. grew into the mur- 
muring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the 
mutinous Parliament of James I., and the 
rebellious Parliament of Charles I." Shortly 
after followed the Revolution of 1688, when 
the era of popular reforms was fully inaugu- 
rated, which movements, as we have seen, were 
greatly accelerated by the causes which precipi- 
tated the revolutions in France and in America 
a century later. 

/ The peculiar circumstances under which the 
people of the British Colonies in this country 
had been reared and the peculiar discipline which 
they had undergone were singularly favorable to 
the development of the conditions prerequisite to 
self-government. No fact was more patent 
than this to the minds of the men who framed 
the Federal Constitution. "It was evident," 
wrote Madison in the Federalist, "that no other 
form (of government than one strictly repub- 
lican) would be reconcilable with the genius of 
the American people; with the fundamental 
principles of the Revolution ; or with that honor- 
able determination which animates every votary 
of freedom, to rest all of our political experi- 
ments upon the capacity of the people for self- 
government." We know that with Thomas 



124 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

Jefferson faith in this popular principle was, 
from first to last, an intense religious conviction, 
and that his ideas upon this point stamped the 
character of our national policy for sixty years 
of our national existence. We know too, how 
Abraham Lincoln, inspired by a like faith and 
trust in the people, never for an instant doubted 
the final issue when the life of the nation long 
hung trembling in the balance. In the beautiful 
and impressive words of George Bancroft, he 
"was led along by the greatness of their self- 
sacrificing example; and as a child, in a dark 
night, on a rugged way, catches hold of the hand 
of its father for guidance and support, he clung 
fast to the hand of the people, and moved 
calmly through the gloom." 

It is hardly necessary in this connection to 
add, as a general fact, that our hundred years 
of national experience has served but to confirm 
our faith in the "signal sagacity and prescience" 
of the Fathers in thus justly recognizing and 
interpreting the deep-seated bias of the Amer- 
ican people for popular institutions, and in 
constructing from the materials at hand a frame- 
work of government so consummately adapted 
to the successful working out of the principle. 
The "danger of a leveling spirit" — of an "excess 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 12:5 

of democracy," — which Gerry, Sherman, and 
Hamilton so much feared and deprecated, has 
by no means been realized. Yet we have no 
doubt gone much further in this direction than 
was ever dreamed of in that day ; further, indeed 
in some respects, than history or tradition 
ascribes to any of the primitive Aryan democ- 
racies. In our earlier history the archaic notion 
descending to us from the tribal communities of 
ancient Germany, that political rights and 
powers are inseparably joined with the owner- 
ship of the land, still largely prevailed in this 
country, as it has continued to prevail in Great 
Britain down to our own time, though with a 
constantly abating tendency. 

The successive popular movements by which 
we have broken away from those old moorings 
and which in this country have finally brought 
us to the acceptance of universal suffrage, it 
must be admitted, have not always been attended 
with altogether satisfactory results. Nor have 
the motives which have brought about such 
extensions of the political franchise always been 
of the loftiest character. In England the exi- 
gencies of the struggle between the king and the 
barons, and in this country the exigencies of the 
struggle between political parties, have no doubt 



126 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

had quite as much to do with the matter as any 
considerations of State or of the classes enfran- 
chised. The extent to which ignorance and venal 
practices still prevail at popular elections, both 
in England and the United States, makes it 
quite manifest that the electorate might be 
liberally pruned down or weeded out without 
seriously compromising the best interests of the 
State. It would have been much the sounder 
policy for us in this country to have thrown some 
restrictions about the right of suffrage so as to 
exclude all such elements as did not comprehend 
the dignity and sacredness of that high preroga- 
tive and such as were incapable of social or ethical 
assimilation. Especially was the sudden enfran- 
chisement of the three million ex-slaves of the 
Southern States, utterly destitute as these 
people were of education, of property, of polit- 
ical training, or of other prerequisites of citizen- 
ship, a most immense and disastrous experiment. 
We shall have more to say of this egregious 
crime against suffrage in another place. But 
with respect to the assimilable elements which 
we have clothed with the right of suffrage, it is 
perhaps generally conceded that these popular 
concessions have, upon the whole, accomplished 
more good than evil and promise no less liberal 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 127 

balance of advantages for the future. Grant 
that the Dennis Kearneys, Herr Mosts, and other 
kindred pestiferous agitators, may run, as they 
now and then have run, their brief, sickly hour. 
Yet we need not doubt that the sober second 
thought of the people at large can always be 
counted on to restore the normal course of 
events before much serious harm can ensue. If 
our type of democracy instinctively revolts at 
the pretensions of absolute or irresponsible rule 
as applied to itself, it no less radically and 
heartily abominates the lawless schemes and 
proclivities of the socialists, anarchists, nihilists, 
or what-nots,* that abide at the other extreme. 
Happily, however, even our most uncultured 
classes of voters who have any conception at all 
of the dignity and responsibility of citizenship, 
usually evince enough of native common sense to 
take a practical view of affairs, and to demand 
a higher standard of qualification for public 
office than they are conscious is likely to be found 

* Bryce's American Commonwealth, ii. 272: "There may be 
pernicious experiments tried in legislation. There may be occa- 
sional outbreaks of violence. . . . One thing, however, need 
not be apprehended, the thing with which alarmists most fre- 
quently terrify us; there will not be anarchy. The forces which 
restore order and maintain it when restored are as strong in 
America as anywhere else in the world." 



128 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

upon their own level. And, what is more, such 
electorate has generally proven itself leavened 
with enough of sturdy, homely virtue to answer 
fairly well the essential requirements of popular 
government. As Matthew Arnold has frankly 
testified of that body, "it in general sees its social 
and political concerns straight and sees them 
clear." We know full well indeed that in these 
respects we are as yet scarcely out of our 
swaddling clothes. We know that ignorance, 
selfishness, prejudice, and passion still too 
largely dominate our thought and action. Mr. 
Arnold, as an example, has hardly overdrawn 
our conspicuous shortcomings as exhibited over 
the unconscionable farce of the Guiteau trial. 
Yet, upon the whole, we have brought to our 
task enough of sterling qualities to build up and 
successfully work one of the greatest nations of 
history, and what we yet most lack intellectually 
and morally we believe we may safely entrust 
to the free school, the free pulpit, and the gen- 
eral teachings of experience to supply. 

Another aspect of the question of suffrage 
invites examination. The successive advances in 
this direction, it is to be noted, have not, gen- 
erally speaking, been suddenly sprung in the 
nature of sheer experiments. They have been 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 129 

the product of no evanescent or adventitious 
conditions. They have been, rather, the natural 
and legitimate outgrowths of new or altered 
social developments, which had been long and 
gradually taking definite shape and consistency. 
In other words, they have been in the main 
simply the normal manifestations of natural 
forces — the development and introduction of the 
additional machinery which the intellectual and 
material progress of the State had rendered 
necessary and inevitable. And what is true in 
this respect of the United States is still more 
true of Great Britain. Sir Thomas Erskine 
May, unlike Macaulay and other writers of 
monarchic bias who have been quoted, accepts 
this growth and diffusion of democratic influ- 
ence as the sign and measure of actual social 
advancement, and takes occasion to speak with 
becoming pride of the improvements which as 
results of this impulse have been wrought out in 
his own country since the Reform Act of 1832. 
The constant development of popular influence, 
as the outcome of the intellectual and material 
progress of nations, he believes should be ac- 
cepted as natural law. His reasoning on the 
principle involved in the movement is quite as 
applicable on this side of the Atlantic as on the 

9 



ISO THE AMERICAN IDEA 

other, and will here be reproduced so far as 
space will permit. He says : 

"Such a law, like other laws which shape the destinies 
of man, is to be reverently studied, and accepted without 
prejudice, as a beneficent influence designed for the general 
benefit of society. Let us not be too prone to condemn, or 
dread it, as a social danger. Rather let us learn to interpret 
it rightly, and to apply it, with careful discernment, to the 
government of free states. If it be a law that the progres- 
sive civilization of a nation increases the power of a people, 
let that power be welcomed, and gradually associated with 
the state. The same cause which creates the power, also 
qualifies the people to exercise it. In a country half civil- 
ized, popular power is wielded by a mob; in a civilized 
community, it is exercised by the legitimate agencies of 
freedom, — by the press, by public discussion, by associa- 
tion, and by electoral contests. If ignored, distrusted, 
defied, or resisted by rulers, it provokes popular discon- 
tents, disorders, and revolutions; if welcomed and 
propitiated, it is a source of strength and national union. 
To discern rightly the progress of society, and to meet its 
legitimate claims to political influence, has become one of 
the highest functions of modern statesmanship." 

Such "electoral contests," it may be added, 
should be frequent if the best results would be 
obtained. This policy, we are aware, is looked 
upon with more or less disfavor; nevertheless, 
those who have given the most study to the 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 131 

subject are fully persuaded that the compensa- 
tions resulting, if properly considered, largely 
outweigh the drawbacks. By this means only 
can the government be kept close to the people, 
the laws in any sort of correspondence with the 
social facts. In this way the political and social 
forces, like the forces of physical nature, are 
allowed to perform their appointed functions, 
not by the violent, capricious modes of "demoli- 
tion and reconstruction," but by the natural, 
regular, gradual, peaceful processes of growth 
and development. To be sure, now and then 
things will at best go more or less awry. But 
an outburst, a blast, a "tidal wave," is equally 
sure equitably to square the account and leave 
all concerned the better for what has happened. 
There is a stage in the progress of human 
development, no doubt, when the relation of lord 
and vassal is essential to the maintenance of any 
sort of security of person and property. As 
Mr. Mill has remarked, until "mankind have 
become capable of being improved by free and 
equal discussion, . . . there is nothing for them 
but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charle- 
magne, if they are so fortunate as to find one." 
But with the Anglo-Saxon race the element of 
"free and equal discussion" long since became a 



132 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

prominent, if not a ruling, attribute of politics. 
In proportion as this power has made itself felt 
in society, the need of a system of suzerainty, 
or paternalism, has passed away, and, as a con- 
sequence, the privileged classes — the "God's 
anointed" — have themselves gone into decline. 
The general spread of intelligence, the rise of 
the middle classes, the emancipation of thought 
and conscience, the supplanting of the militant 
by the industrial type of society, the develop- 
ment of the principle of representation, — these 
facts all testify to the marked upward transitions 
which we have thus undergone. Whatever rea- 
son, therefore, that may once have existed for 
the support of royalty and aristocracy, that 
reason, so far at least as Anglosaxondom is con- 
cerned, exists no longer. "The United States" — 
to quote again from Walter Bagehot — "could 
not have become monarchical even if the constitu- 
tional convention had decreed it, even if the 
component states had ratified it." The elements 
essential to monarchy had become entirely want- 
ing. The same acute publicist has been quoted 
on a previous page as saying with respect to 
England that there the living essence of a 
Republic has intruded itself within the dead shell 
of the Monarchy. The prerogatives of the 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 133 

Crown have passed to the Ministry, and the 
function of the Lords as an estate of the realm 
has shrunken into a like state of comparative 
impotence. Practically speaking, the Commons 
are now the Parliament, and the People the 
Commons.* 

What else, indeed, than this was to be ex- 
pected, considering the notorious incapacity of 
the monarchic elements for anything but a 
nominal place in the body politic, even if no other 
influences had been operating to the same pur- 
pose? The born-king, for example, is put down 
by our same clever critic as but "an average man 
to begin with; in the long run he will be neither 
clever nor stupid ; he will be the simple, common 
man who plods the plain routine of life from the 
cradle to the grave." The peerage is character- 
ized in terms scarcely more complimentary. 
"Being a set of eldest sons picked out by chance," 

* As Prof. Wilson {Cong. Gov.) shows, the same tendency of 
the legislative branch to override and absorb all governmental 
powers has been in progress in this country, as well as in Great 
Britain. The "checks and balances" and the division of functions 
among co-ordinate departments — safeguards against the encroach- 
ments of despotism which were so much relied upon by Mon- 
tesquieu and succeeding statesmen and political theorists 
generally down to a quite recent date — have been found in 
practice to be largely mythical. The branch that holds the purse- 
strings holds the key to the entire citadel of government. 



134 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

it cannot be very wise. It would be a "standing 
miracle" if such "accidents of accidents" should 
possess a knowledge equal to that of men who 
had raised themselves to eminence by sheer dint 
of their own exertions. True, the Crown * and 
the aristocracy of England still command much 
deference and loyalty among Englishmen, and 
thus exert, indirectly, no little influence upon the 
character and trend of English political life. 
But it seems scarcely conceivable that a poten- 
tiality like this, springing not from superior 
worth, superior knowledge, or superior ability, 
but simply and solely from the empty glamour of 
hereditary caste, should be long allowed to clog 
and hamper the boasted genius and aptitude of 

* The relation of the Crown to the Government is given at length 
in Fifty Years of the Eng. Const., by Amos. But the following 
epitome from Bagehot's Eng. Const, must suffice for our present 
purpose: "In addition to the control over particular ministers, 
and especially over the foreign minister, the Queen has a certain 
control over the Cabinet. The first minister, it is understood, 
transmits to her authentic information of all the most important 
decisions, together with what the newspapers would do equally 
well, the more important votes in Parliament. He is bound to 
take care that she knows everything which there is to know as to 
the passing politics of the nation. She has by rigid usage a right 
to complain if she does not know of every great act of her 
ministry, not only before it is done, but while there is yet time to 
consider it — while it is still possible that it may not be done." In 
short, it is her right "to be consulted, to encourage, to warn." 



PEOPLE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 135 

the Anglo-Saxon for the business of self- 
government. If it is desirable to "kotow" to 
somebody, as it is said every Englishman must,* 
why not let it be to the nobility of democracy — 
the self-made nobility of nature — the nobility 
which over here is native and to the manner born ; 
which naturally and fittingly drops into the 
leadership of modern Anglo-Saxon society; 
which, no less than Macaulay's "select class," 
"is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in 
the security of property and the maintenance of 
order?" This, obviously, is the rational, prac- 
tical view to be taken. It is the view that accords 
with the matter-of-fact spirit of modern enlight- 
ened thought; and the view, if the signs of the 
times mean anything, that must enter more and 
more deeply and with increasing celerity into 
the minds and habits of the Anglo-Saxon race 
till in the British Empire, as in the United 
States, the last vestige of feudalism shall be 
swept away and the full fruits of a true Republic 
shall be realized. 

* For a racy description of this obsequiousness to rank and title 
see Badeau's Aristocracy in England. 



THE PRINCIPLE OF 
INDIVIDUALITY 



VIII. 

THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY. 

QNE of the most important transitions mark- 
ing the progress of social order is the 
transition from community to individual respon- 
sibility. In the lower stages of culture, the 
status of each individual is determined by the 
accident of birth, and accountability for offenses 
rests upon the corporate community, and not 
upon the particular offender. The peculiarity 
of such adjustment is to repress all tendency to 
variation from the start. "Fixed custom which 
public opinion alone tolerates is imposed on all 
minds, whether they like it or not." The intense 
superstitious awe with which this custom comes 
everywhere to be regarded, coupled as it always 
is with the idea of corporate responsibility, 
affords a true explanation of that spirit of perse- 
cution for nonconformity which is all-pervading 
in the earlier periods of religious history. "The 
whole community is possessed with the idea that 
if the primal usages of the tribe be broken, harm 
unspeakable will happen in ways you cannot 

[139] 



140 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

think of, and from sources you cannot imagine." 
In such society communism and social equality 
are realized in their utmost perfection, and yet, 
if we may believe the testimony of those whose 
research and observation have enabled them best 
to judge, the people thus favored are neverthe- 
less far from happy. War at this stage is the 
chief pursuit; and divination, sorcery, witch- 
craft, torture, mutilation, human sacrifice, can- 
nibalism, penury, famine, pestilence make up the 
dread round of life. Contrary to the popular 
notion, the primitive man "is nowhere free. All 
over the world his daily life is regulated by a 
complicated and often most inconvenient set of 
customs (as forcible as laws), of quaint prohibi- 
tions and privileges; the prohibitions as a rule 
applying to the women, and the privileges to the 
men. Nay, every action of their lives is regu- 
lated by numerous rules, none the less stringent 
because unwritten." The life of the modern 
savage, for example, notwithstanding the poetic 
fancies of the halcyon days 

"When wild in woods the noble savage ran/' 

"is twisted into a thousand curious habits; his 
reason is darkened by a thousand strange preju- 
dices; his feelings are frightened by a thousand 



THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY 141 

cruel superstitions. The whole mind ... is, so 
to say, tattooed over with monstrous images; 
there is not a smooth place anywhere about it." 
Surely, then, "Looking Backward" through the 
true lenses of history will disclose little data 
upon which to build hopes for the ideal socialistic 
state. 

The idea of the complete absorption of the 
individual in the State continued to be a cardinal 
feature of ancient politics even up to the period 
of highest development. Plato taught "that the 
aim of government should not be the happiness 
of the individual, but that of the whole ; and that 
men are to be considered not as men, but as 
elements of the State, a perfect subject differing 
from a slave only in this, that he has the State for 
his master." * This doctrine was a fundamental 
part of the Roman polity from first to last. 
That the State exists for the benefit of the indi- 
vidual, and not the individual for the benefit of 
the State, is an idea distinctly modern and 
Anglican. The principle was first applied to the 
right of conscience. "Over the soul," taught 
Luther, "can and will God allow no one to rule 
but himself alone." But Luther, like all his 

* See Leiber's Political Ethics, ch. xiii, where this feature is 
quite fully discussed. 



142 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

contemporaries, knew little of individual civil 
liberty. It was in England, and through the 
"great rebellion of the laity against the clergy," 
that the principle of Individuality as a universal 
maxim took permanent root and was nurtured 
to maturity. America's most eminent historian 
thus speaks of this principle as it operates in our 
national polity, where its influence is given freer 
and fuller scope than anywhere else in the 
world : 

J "The Constitution establishes nothing that interferes with 
equality and individuality. It knows nothing of differences 
of descent, or opinion, of favored classes, or legalized 
religion, or the political power of property. It leaves the 
individual alongside of the individual. No nationality of 
character could take form except on the principle of indi- 
viduality, so that the mind might be free, and every faculty 
have an unlimited opportunity for its development and 
culture. As the sea is made up of drops, American society 
is composed of separate, free, and constantly moving atoms, 
ever in reciprocal action, advancing, receding, crossing, 
struggling against each other and with each other; so that 
the institutions and laws of the country rise out of the 
masses of individual thought, which like the waters of the 
ocean, roll evermore." 

It is to this fundamental quality of our 
political scheme that we owe that marked parity 
that exists between those "institutions and laws" 



THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY 143 

and the character and genius of our people; a 
circumstance which a few years ago evoked such 
admiration and favorable comment from Mat- 
thew Arnold, on the occasion of his first visit to 
the United States. "As one watches the play 
of their (American) institutions" — so his obser- 
vations impressed him — "the image suggests 
itself to one's mind of a man in a suit of clothes 
which fit him to perfection, leaving all his move- 
ments unimpeded and easy. It is loose where it 
ought to be loose, and it sits close where it ought 
to be close. . . . This wonderful suit of clothes 
is found also to adapt itself naturally to the 
wearer's growth, and to admit all the enlarge- 
ments as they successively arise." 

Another important benefit accruing from this 
characteristic is that, from the constant circula- 
tion that is going on among the units of society 
from bottom to top and from top to bottom no 
stratification into distinct classes as appears in 
the societies of the Old World has with us 
occurred or is ever likely to occur. As Gen. Gar- 
field has eloquently expressed it: 

"Our society does not resemble the crust of the earth 
with its impassable barriers of rock; but resembles rather 
the waters of the mighty sea, deep, broad, boundless, but 
yet so free in all its parts that the drop which mingles 



144 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

with the sand at its bottom is free to rise through all the 
mass of waters till it flashes in the light on the crest of 
the highest wave. There is no boy in America, however 
humble his birth or in whatever depth of poverty his lot 
may be cast, who, if he has a strong arm, a clear head, and 
a brave heart, maj'- not rise by the light of our schools and 
the freedom of our laws, until he shall stand foremost in 
the honor and confidence of his country." 

Mr. Arnold regards this circumstance as a 
fact of much importance, and as one that com- 
pletely confutes Macaulay's Cassandra proph- 
ecy, wherein this great historian predicted that 
"in the course of the next century, if not in this," 
our democracy was "certain" to cost us our 
"liberty or civilization, or both." Mr. Arnold 
argues, further, that because of this trait in our 
society and our consequent freedom from the 
pernicious effects of social castes, our country is, 
when compared with the countries of Europe, 
comparatively exempt from the evils that breed 
revolution. He believes, moreover, that the 
good elements in our society make a way for us 
to escape out of what we really have of this 
danger; also, "to escape" — he emphasizes — "in 
the future as well as now — the future for which 
some observers announce this danger so certain 
and formidable." 



THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY 145 

Still another no less important benefit arises 
from the operation of the principle in question. 
It holds out and guarantees to all men an equal 
chance in the race of life, so far as the law can 
make that chance equal. Thus, an impetus is 
given to that inborn desire in every human being 
to better his own condition, and he is thereby 
enabled to make the most of whatever powers 
and qualities of mind and body of which he may 
be naturally possessed. If this competition, or 
equal opportunity, permits one man to outstrip 
another, and sometimes to abuse the freedom 
vouchsafed him, it also does more. It tends not 
only to bring to the front and keep at the front 
the best and the fittest members of our society, 
but also to elevate the mental, moral, and mate- 
rial standard of the humanity at large. Because 
of this incentive to individual effort held forth 
to all, our country has evolved a race of men 
which Mr. Froude — by no means a biased 
observer — has admitted to be surpassed nowhere 
on earth. "They feel the dignity of freedom and 
the worthiness of moral virtue." They are fur- 
ther, he says, keenly alive to the consciousness that 
"behind each American citizen America is stand- 
ing," and each man is "the man that he is" be- 
cause of the ennobling impulse such consciousness 

10 



146 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

inspires. Thus we have, as a general result, 
two forces at work supplementing and re-inf orc- 
ing each other, — the individual modifying the 
political institutions, and the political institu- 
tions in turn modifying the individual. Such 
interaction between the society and its com- 
ponent parts, it is obvious, can but redound 
largely to the betterment of all concerned. 

The genius of Anglo-Saxon society is pe- 
culiarly favorable for the growth and asser- 
tion of such principle of individuality. Along 
with the rise of the popular branch of the British 
Parliament, there were also evolved as necessary 
concomitants the right of petition and the right 
of assembly, together with the freedom of speech 
and of the press. These were not the gracious, 
generous gifts from the willing hands of power. 
They had to be fought for inch by inch. But 
once won, their fruit has been cherished as 
inestimably sacred by every Englishman in 
whatever land. It is not strange, therefore, that, 
when we came to frame a Constitution for 
ourselves, especial care was taken that these 
principles be made the subject of positive declara- 
tion. The constant exercise of the rights thus 
guaranteed sufficiently attest the popular value 
set upon them as parts of the functions of society 



THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY 147 

and of the State; and our appreciation in this 
direction is heightened the more when by con- 
trast we contemplate the conditions in Conti- 
nental Europe, where to the ordinary citizen the 
ear of government is always difficult of access if 
not wholly and rigidly denied. Those great 
popular meetings which are so common in Great 
Britain and in the United States, and which 
when conducted within legitimate bounds exert 
such a wholesome and potent influence upon the 
action of government, are almost if not alto- 
gether unknown outside of Anglo-Saxon coun- 
tries. Elsewhere, if the popular pulse ever 
makes itself felt at all, it bursts forth in the way 
of an explosion, as was the case in France during 
the first Revolution, the purpose and effect of 
which convulsions are always to tear down and 
destroy rather than to upbuild and improve. 



POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE 



IX. 

POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE. 

^OW, a brief glance at the so-called "science 
of population." The subject is one which 
concerns every civilized country; hence our own; 
and hence the attention given to the matter in 
this place. The usual remedy thus far proposed 
for excess of population has been the old, old 
one, — emigrate, emigrate. Great Britain, for 
example, has been urging her surplus population 
to seek homes in her colonies; while in America 
"Go West, go West," has been the familiar re- 
frain. But this, manifestly, can serve but as a 
temporary expedient, and does not at all go to 
the core of the difficulty. The "colonies," it is 
readily observed, must in time fill up, and our 
great Western expanse is rapidly undergoing the 
same process. When these outlets become closed 
up, and other habitable parts of the globe like- 
wise no longer afford additional room, what 
then? This is the problem that has long vexed 
the sociologist and the philanthropist, and that 
led the Rev. T. R. Malthus in 1798, when more 
than half the world was yet in the possession of 

[151] 



152 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

the savage, to promulgate his famous formula, 
that the tendency of the human race is to increase 
faster than the means of subsistence. Among 
the agencies which he enumerated as necessary to 
preserve the equilibrium between the number of 
mouths to feed and the wherewith to feed them, 
were "all unwholesome occupations, severe labor 
and exposure to the seasons, extreme poverty, 
bad nursing of children, large towns, excesses of 
all kinds, the whole train of common diseases 
and epidemics, wars, plague, and famine." 

This theory, even with its implied denial of the 
beneficence of Providence, was almost univers- 
ally accepted by writers on social and economic 
subjects during the first half of this century, and 
was made the ready scapegoat for all the penury 
and wretchedness that, in the crowded centres of 
population, pinched and starved, Tantalus-like, 
in the midst of opulence, ease, and plenty. The 
idea still has many adherents, but it is by no 
means so widely credited now as formerly. God- 
win, Allison, Doubleday, and Spencer are ranked 
among the eminent authorities in Great Britain 
that reject the hypothesis; and even Whately, 
Mill, and McCullough, while acknowledging the 
principle, are free to admit that thus far counter 



POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE 153 

tendencies have neutralized its effects. Indeed, 
McCullough, like Macaulay in his chapter on the 
"State of England in 1665," goes much further 
in this direction. "Let any one," he says, "com- 
pare the state of this (England) or any other 
European country five hundred or a thousand 
years ago and he will be satisfied that prodigious 
advances have been made, that the means of 
subsistence has increased much more rapidly 
than population, and that the laboring classes 
are now generally in possession of conveniences 
and luxuries that once were not enjoyed by the 
richest lord." In this country, Carey, Thomp- 
son, Bowen, George, and Atkinson are among 
the more prominent assailants of this so-called 
"science." 

So far as the question of over-population is 
concerned, it is coming to be denied, on high 
authority, both in this country and abroad, that 
there is at present, or ever will be, any such thing. 
Congestion at some points often happens, as the 
flood-tides of civilization surge this way or that, 
and the centres of population are constantly 
changing; but, with a proper diffusion of num- 
bers, it is felt that there is, and always will be, 
room enough for all. Professor Thompson and 



154 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

Henry George argue ably and convincingly to 
this effect; and Professor Haeckel, perhaps the 
greatest of German philosophers living, asserts 
it as an accepted biological truth that, "taken as 
a whole, the number of living animals and plants 
on our earth remains always about the same. The 
number of places in the economy of nature," the 
writer goes on to explain, "is limited, and, in most 
parts of the earth's surface, these places are 
always approximately occupied. Certainly there 
occurs everywhere and in every year fluctuations 
in the absolute and relative number of individ- 
uals, of all species. However, taken as a whole, 
these fluctuations are of little importance, and it 
is broadly the fact that the total number of all 
individuals remains, on the average, almost 
constant." This general statement of a biological 
principle is in the same connection made to apply 
specifically to human beings, as well as to other 
species of organic nature. Herbert Spencer's 
incomparable analytical and deductive powers 
have been brought to bear to the elucidation of 
the same problem. Certain natural forces, he 
tells us, come into play when needful to preserve 
the wonted equilibrium between population and 
its environment — between the number of mouths 
to feed and the wherewith to feed them. Such 



POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE 155 

adjusting forces are held to be self-regulative in 
their operations, and the processes involve none 
of the revolting consequences incident to the 
Malthusian concept. Says the profound author 
of "A System of Synthetic Philosophy": 

"The excess of fertility has rendered the 
process of civilization necessary; and the process 
of civilization must inevitably diminish fertility, 
and at last destroy its excess. From the begin- 
ning the pressure of population has been the 
proximate cause of progress. It produced the 
original diffusion of the race. It compelled men 
to abandon predatory habits and take to agricul- 
ture. It led to the clearing of the earth's sur- 
face. It forced men into the social state; made 
social organization inevitable, and has developed 
the social sentiments. It has stimulated to 
progressive improvements in production, and to 
increased skill and intelligence. It is daily 
thrusting us into closer contact and more 
mutually dependent relationships. After hav- 
ing caused, as it ultimately must, the due peo- 
pling of the globe, and the raising of all its 
habitable parts to the highest state of culture; 
after having brought all processes for the satis- 
faction of human wants to perfection; after 
having at the same time developed the intellect 



156 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

into complete fitness for the social life, — the 
pressure of population must gradually bring 
itself to an end." 

As to the capabilities of the soil, Mr. Atkin- 
son, who has devoted much attention to the 
subject, arrives at the cheering conclusion "that 
there need be no fear of want, because there is 
room enough for all. . . . No man yet knows 
the capacity of a single acre of land with respect 
to food. ... In the world there is somewhere 
and always enough. The only question is, 
Where is it? When found, the next question 
that arises, is, How to get it?" Those persons 
who, like the present writer and many others in 
this country, have been privileged to witness per- 
sonally the transition of regions from the state 
of nature to a state of high cultivation, and the 
society from the rude, simple state of savagery 
to a refined and complex state of civilization, and 
have noted the relative increase in the necessaries 
and comforts that have accompanied such transi- 
tion, will be the better prepared to accept Mr. 
Atkinson's conclusions thus advanced as to the 
comparative inexhaustibility of the productive re- 
sources of nature, if but the hands of industry be 
applied to their development and their adaptation 



POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE 157 

to the needs and desires of man. Indeed, it 
requires but the most superficial glance at the 
facts of primitive society to become convinced 
that the lower the scale of social and material 
development, the more habitual and pinching the 
poverty, and the more frequent and destructive 
the ravages of famine and pestilence. And, vice 
versa, as this scale of culture rises, the average 
standard of human comfort and happiness, it is 
seen, unmistakably rises with it. Enforced idle- 
ness and its accompanying destitution and dis- 
tress, of which unhappily we are now-a-days too 
frequently the witnesses, is undoubtedly attribut- 
able more to undue congestion of some part of 
the industrial organism than to a diseased condi- 
tion of the whole. But whatever the derange- 
ments which may from time to time ensue from 
this source, the difficulty need not perforce be of 
more than temporary duration. In this era of 
personal freedom, of cheap, easy and rapid 
transit, of wide and intimate intellectual and 
commercial intercourse, and of generally broad, 
cosmopolitan ideas, one locality or one occu- 
pation becoming unduly crowded is readily 
exchangeable for another. Thus may we hope 
it will ever be. 



158 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

Another argument damaging to the theory in 
question might be urged, were it necessary. In 
espousing the claims of such theory, it is not dif- 
ficult to perceive that the whole moral tenor and 
conduct of our lives belie the sincerity of our 
professions. If we honestly believe that hu- 
manity is to starve at last, why, as Mr. Atkinson 
suggests, "all our efforts to prevent war, to stop 
famine, to alleviate poverty; or to save life from 
disease and pestilence?" For, truly, if such is 
to be the frightful end, "the more we accomplish 
for the present generations of men, the more 
must posterity suffer, the more urgent must the 
struggle for life become, the more fearful must 
be the anarchy when the whole art of living can 
consist only in securing a sufficient subsistence 
for the few by any method of force or fraud, 
even at the cost of those who starve." Few per- 
sons, we imagine, would be willing to accept a 
doctrine which when pushed to its full logical 
consequences they would find so thoroughly 
monstrous. Rather should we, taking all in all, 
acquiesce in the more rational, hopeful conclusion 
that, whatever the social or economic afflictions 
which come upon us, the fault is to be sought in 
ourselves or in the maladjustments of society, 



POPULATION AND SUBSISTENCE 159 

and not (as Mai thus would have it) in the piti- 
less, inexorable dispensation of a niggard and 
ill-ordered Providence. Such at least, is the 
humane, the Christian-like view, and the view 
which would appear to be amply sustained by the 
preponderance of facts. 



LEADING FEATURES OF THE 
AMERICAN POLITY 



11 



X. 

SEVERAL LEADING FEATURES OF THE AMERICAN 
POLITY CONSIDERED. 

HPHUS far in this hurried sketch, the Anglo- 
Saxon race has been considered so far as 
practicable as one people, the several branches 
being regarded as closely enough of kin in blood, 
in ideas, and in institutions to warrant such 
method of treatment. That the framers of the 
American Constitution copied the British model 
as closely as the conditions would admit of is a 
fact too manifest to be successfully questioned. 
The executive, the legislative, and the judicial 
branches were thus fashioned ; and the principles, 
rights, and guaranties adopted were nearly all 
borrowed from the various English historic codes 
and charters from the reign of Alfred to the 
reign of William and Mary. The same is true 
of the constitutions and bills of rights of the 
several States of the Union. 

But it is equally manifest that in some partic- 
ulars there is a marked difference between the 
original and the copy. While most of these 

[163] 



164 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

features peculiar to the American instrument 
had heen conceived on English soil, they yet had 
never found a place in English law. Among 
these may be mentioned, first, the idea of Fed- 
eral-Republicanism. Through the union of 
Church and State in England, the persecuted 
Dissenters learned to hate the secular authority 
equally with the ecclesiastical. Monarchy was 
at the head of the Church, and Monarchy they 
hated because, as the head of the Church, it was 
the supporter and abettor of the intolerable 
wrongs they were suffering. This sentiment and 
feeling the Pilgrims of the Mayflower brought 
with them to the New World, where they were 
carefully and sacredly nurtured until ultimately 
they bore their fruitage in the blood of the Revo- 
lution. Royalty and aristocracy, with all their 
train of monarchical accompaniments, they left 
beyond ocean. They brought with them, politi- 
cally, only an implacable hatred of monarchy 
and an unbounded love of liberty, and these 
sentiments and feelings would be satisfied with 
nothing short of unalloyed republican institu- 
tions. True (as mentioned on a preceding 
page), Adams, Hamilton, and other statesmen 
equally patriotic, cherished theoretically a 
decided bias for the English Constitution. 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 165 

Hamilton would have the Executive and the 
Senate chosen for life. Indeed, there then 
appeared to be an opposite tendency which 
was perhaps equally to be dreaded. "All the 
evils we experience," said Gerry, "flow from the 
excess of democracy. . . . He had been too re- 
publican heretofore, but had been taught by 
experience the danger of a leveling spirit." The 
all important problem with the Constitutional 
Convention was to devise some mechanism by 
which to bind these discordant elements together, 
and at the same time to give strength, stability, 
and harmony to the system. After long, patient, 
patriotic, often excited effort, a Federal Republic 
was born, the first in all history. 

The absolute divorcement of Church and 
State, and the complete secularization of politics, 
were then also untried experiments in govern- 
ment. Our country was the first to guarantee 
not only religious toleration, but absolute 
religious equality. The Constitution, we know, 
expressly declares that — 

"No religious test shall ever be required, as a 
qualification to any office or public trust in the 
United States." 

And, again, the Constitution states that — 

"Congress shall make no law respecting an 



166 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free 
exercise thereof." 

Justice Story says of these provisions: "It 
was under a solemn consciousness of the dangers 
from ecclesiastical ambition, the bigotry of 
spiritual pride, and the intolerance of sects, ex- 
emplified in our domestic, as well as in foreign 
annals, that it was deemed advisable to exclude 
from the national government all power to act 
on the subject. The situation, too, in the dif- 
ferent States equally proclaimed the policy, as 
well as the necessity, of such an exclusion." The 
spirit of the law has been well set forth in an 
opinion of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania: 
"It intermeddles not with the natural and inde- 
feasible right of all men to worship God accord- 
ing to the dictates of their own consciences; it 
compels none to attend, erect, or support any 
place of worship; or to maintain any ministry 
against his consent ; it pretends not to control or 
to interfere with the rights of conscience, and it 
establishes no preference for any religious estab- 
lishment or mode of worship. It treats no 
religious doctrine as paramount in the State; it 
enforces no unwilling attendance upon the cele- 
bration of divine worship." It is sufficient to 
add, that the experience of a hundred years has 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 167 

fully demonstrated the wisdom of the Fathers 
of the Republic in the adoption of this grave 
experiment. Everywhere the principle has be- 
come firmly intrenched in our national life, and 
canonized in the hearts of our people.* The 
influences which led to this advanced step cannot, 
however, be credited wholly to Anglican sources ; 
for at the beginning of the Revolution, it is well 
known that neither the mother country nor the 
American colonies were particularly distin- 
guished for their devotion to the principles of 
religious liberty. Each of the thirteen colonies 
still had some kinds of restrictions or regulations 
on the subject of religion; and in New York and 
Massachusetts, these went to the length that 
Catholic priests were held liable to imprisonment, 
and even to death. We should look rather to 
France for the chief impelling forces which led 
to that happy consummation. No doubt the 

* This is undoubtedly the result to which the progress of civil- 
ization everywhere tends. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Q. C. 
(before quoted) is the only contemporaneous layman of note 
known to me as questioning the soundness of the principle. 
Among other things upon this point he says: "I think that 
governments ought to take the responsibility of acting upon such 
principles, religious, political and moral, as they may from time to 
time regard as most likely to be true, and this they cannot do 
without exercising a very considerable degree of coercion." — 
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 53. 



.-' 



168 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

rationalistic and sceptical spirit which culminated 
in the French Revolution, created a profound 
sensation in America, and that the teachings of 
Bayle, Montaigne, Descartes, Voltaire and Rous- 
seau found their highest expression in the funda- 
mental law of the new Republic. 

A third leading characteristic of the American 
polity is the wide latitude it allows to home rule. 
To cultivate habits of self-reliance among the 
people, and to confide to their management so 
far as practicable their domestic concerns, is 
among its foremost aims and loftiest virtues. "It 
is axiomatic," says Judge Cooley, "that the man- 
agement of purely local affairs belongs to the 
people concerned, not only because of their being 
their own affairs, but because they will best 
understand and be most competent to manage 
them." The great value of this principle is 
forcibly illustrated by John Stuart Mill. "In 
proportion," he says, "as a people are accustomed 
to manage their affairs by their own active inter- 
vention, instead of leaving them to the govern- 
ment, their desires will turn to repelling tyranny, 
rather than to tyrannize; while in proportion as 
all real initiative and direction resides in the 
government, and individuals habitually feel and 
act as under its perpetual tutelage, popular 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 169 

institutions develop in them not the desire of free- 
dom, but an unmeasured appetite for place and 
power; diverting the activity and intelligence of 
the country from its principal business to a 
wretched competition for selfish prizes and the 
petty vanities of office." The extent to which 
this idea of decentralization should be carried out 
in actual practice — that is, how liberally or other- 
wise the Constitution should be construed in this 
direction — is by no means settled in this country 
even to-day. It is, indeed, still a living, burn- 
ing political question, as it ever has been since 
the days of Hamilton and Jefferson — a question 
which no general prescription seems able strictly 
to limit or to define. We cannot, however, shut 
our eyes to the patent fact as to the direction in 
which the powers of government in this country 
are drifting. From the very beginning, and 
especially since the close of our Civil War, the 
tendency has been for the Federal authority to 
swallow up that of the States. Prof. Woodrow 
Wilson, in his Congressional Government, has 
brought out this fact in vivid light. One after 
another of the powers and functions of the State 
governments have slipped away through the en- 
croachments of the general government until 
the powers of the latter, through its hundred 



170 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

thousand officers and through the stretching of 
its legislative and administrative functions, is 
brought "home to every man's door, as, no less 
than his own State government, his immediate 
overlord." The reconstruction acts, the national 
banking act, the federal supervision of general 
elections, the inter-state commerce act, the oleo- 
margarine act, the commissions appointed to 
inquire into this, that, and the other alleged 
grievance, are instances with which we of this 
day are all of us but too familiar. Yet there are 
being pushed or are being mooted a thousand and 
one other schemes looking to a still further ex- 
tension of the policy of centralization. Such 
are the Blair educational bill, the projects to 
purchase and control the railroad and telegraph 
lines, the plotting to set up a federal censorship 
over the political concerns of the States of the 
South upon the plea of protecting the negro, 
and, most wild and dangerous of all, the scheme 
of the Farmers' Alliance to convert the Govern- 
ment into a loan agency for the benefit of a 
special class. Is it not indeed high time, in view 
of the alarming spirit prevailing in this direction, 
that we call a halt, look well to our bearings, and 
see if we are not rushing with dangerous precipi- 
tation either toward communism on the one hand 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 171 

or despotism on the other? Little wonder, indeed, 
that the temper of the times should have brought 
forth the spawns of Henry Georges and Edward 
Bellamys. It should be remembered that 
nothing is so fatal to progress as uniformity. As 
Herbert Spencer shows, the course of evolu- 
tionary development is wholly in the other 
direction— from the homogeneous to the hetero- 
geneous. One of the causes that hastened the 
downfall of Rome was her policy of endeavoring 
to cramp all the interests of her vast empire 
within a single iron mould. Society needs to be 
so subdivided as that each part shall serve by 
emulation, rivalry, and example to stimulate and 
energize every other part. This principle is best 
subserved in the relations of a true federal re- 
public; and the American people cannot exercise 
too keen a vigilance in seeing to it that the happy 
political interaction thus secured be not allowed, 
upon one pretext and another, to become seri- 
ously impaired. 

Again, the American system is based on a 
theory of sovereignty which is exactly the con- 
verse of the English theory. In America the 
ultimate power resides in the people, and to this 
theory the entire nomenclature of government 
strictly conforms. In all departments, the 



172 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

people are constantly kept in view as the source 
whence springs all legitimate authority. In 
England, on the contrary, though the govern- 
ment may as a fact be a "disguised republic," yet 
that disguised republic is in theory well-nigh an 
absolute despotism.* The Crown represents the 
entire body politic. "Her Majesty's domin- 
ions," "Her Majesty's government," "Her 
Majesty's subjects," — such is the style of phrase- 
ology that runs through her whole political sys- 
tem. So dominating is the influence of these 
symbolisms of monarchy that the bulk of the 
English subjects even yet see in the government 

* What the forms of law would allow the Queen to do without 
consulting Parliament, were the ancient prerogatives not cir- 
cumscribed by the force of public opinion, is not a little surprising 
in view of the actual practice of the Constitution of to-day. 
"Not to mention other things, she could disband the army (by 
law she cannot engage more than a certain number of men, but 
she is not obliged to engage any men) ; she could dismiss all the 
officers, from the General Commanding-ih-Chief downwards; she 
could dismiss all the sailors too; she could sell off all our ships of 
war and all our naval stores; she could make a peace by the 
sacrifice of Cornwall, and begin a war for the conquest of 
Brittany. She could make every citizen in the United Kingdom, 
male or female, a peer ; she could make every parish in the 
United Kingdom a 'university'; she could dismiss most of the 
civil servants; she could by prerogative upset all the action of 
civil government within the government, could disgrace the 
nation by a bad war or peace, and could, by disbanding our 
forces, whether land or sea, leave us defenceless against foreign 
nations." 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 173 

the Crown and nothing but the Crown. Indeed, 
England's autocratic forms and symbolisms are 
the chief bulwarks of her monarchical institu- 
tions ; while the democratical forms, symbolisms, 
and habits of thought on this side of the ocean, 
are among the strongest safeguards of our demo- 
cratic institutions. 

It may be well in this connection to state what 
is meant by the word sovereign or sovereignty in 
a democratical polity. It does not now mean as 
it once meant the absolute despotism of the 
majority; it means the rule of the majority 
within the forms and limitations prescribed by 
law. Neither the officers of state, nor indeed 
the whole body of the people themselves, are per- 
mitted for an instant to step beyond the bounds 
thus circumscribed. M. Guizot, the accom- 
plished French historian and statesman, has given 
us a most rational definition of this much abused 
term. He holds that in true representative 
government that power can reside nowhere — not 
in one man, not in the majority, not even in the 
whole people ; it can be sought after only in the 
infinite realms of reason, justice, and truth. "AH 
powers," he says, "which exist as a fact, must in 
order to become a right, act according to reason, 
justice, and truth. No man, and no body of 



174 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

men, can know and perform fully all that is re- 
quired of reason, justice and truth; but they 
have the faculty to discover it, and can be brought 
more and more to conform to it in their conduct." 
The majority may be presumed to have discov- 
ered the true law; but the majority, no less than 
the minority, are liable to err. Hence the acts 
and the opinions of the dominant party ought at 
all times to be left open for criticism, and for 
revision should they prove to be unsound or 
inexpedient. Justice Story also lays down the 
doctrine that, in a republican government, it is 
a "fundamental truth that the minority have 
indisputable and inalienable rights; that the 
majority are not everything and the minority 
nothing; that the people may not do what they 
please; but that their power is limited to what is 
just to all composing society." In a word, to 
restrain the majority and protect the minority, 
and give free play to the pursuit of "reason, 
justice and truth," is the chief purpose of Consti- 
tutional law everywhere.* 

* The ancients never for a moment doubted the inherent right 
of government, however constituted, to do absolutely as it pleased. 
Hence the ease with which the functions of state were then often 
usurped in turn, as it might happen, by the one, the few, or the 
manv. See Lieber's Political Ethics, ch. xiii. 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 175 

Lastly, the American Constitution and its 
British prototype differ as to form, the one being 
said to be written and the other to be unwritten. 
The former is sometimes objected to upon the 
ground that being written, it lacks the flexibility 
and adaptiveness necessary to meet the varying 
conditions of a growing and aggressive civiliza- 
tion. It will be remembered, as an instance in 
point, that President Buchanan in one of his 
official messages proclaimed that he was without 
constitutional warrant to employ force to sup- 
press the insurrection in the Southern States. 
And only the other day, so experienced a states- 
man and loyal American as Mr. Blaine 
announced in a public speech the opinion that 
certain of the crying abuses which had fastened 
themselves upon the country were "largely 
private affairs" with which neither the President 
nor anybody else had "any particular right to 
interfere." 

But the People — the tribunal of last resort in 
popular government — have shown thus far, in 
every instance when put to the test, that they 
were by no means as yet prepared to abdicate 
their sovereign majesty in any such listless, 
ignoble way. They have shown, on the contrary, a 
vivid consciousness of their having been reared in 



176 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

the tradition and belief that to "establish justice, 
insure domestic tranquility, provide for the com- 
mon defence," and "promote the general wel- 
fare" are among the first objects for which 
governments are ordained among men. We 
know at what tremendous cost of men and means 
the nation repudiated Buchanan's pronounce- 
ment of our constitutional impotence to save the 
Union. The nation looked upon its common 
interests through no such superfine lenses; the 
instinct of patriotism and of plain, practical 
common sense was its sole and trusted guidance. 
It took up the gauge the Secessionists had 
thrown down with an eye single to the conviction 
that, with the nation as with the individual, self 
preservation is the all-paramount law. President 
Lincoln hesitated not an instant when occasion 
was pressing to brush away his predecessor's 
over-wrought niceties of the Constitution as if 
they were of the merest cobweb, and he struck at 
Secession from every available quarter, utterly 
regardless of any hair-spun notions as to the hows 
and whys. "I felt" — so he wrote in 1864 — "that 
measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might be- 
come lawful by becoming indispensable to the 
preservation of the Constitution through the 
preservation of the nation. Right or wrong I 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 177 

assumed this ground, and now I avow it." This 
was indeed but putting in strong words what in a 
less direct and overt form has been the general 
practice of the government, in its several depart- 
ments, from the first. The prompt and decisive 
voice with which the country rejected the star- 
tling and dangerous proposition of the distin- 
guished statesman from Maine gives ample proof 
that this same spirit of self-protection is still 
keenly alive in the people, and is intent upon 
asserting itself whenever the occasion may arise 
for its need. 

So far as the Federal Constitution is con- 
cerned, the direct and implied grants it confers, 
we shall doubtless always find in the future, as 
we have found in the past, are broad enough and 
strong enough for every exigency. Constitu- 
tional law, like other law, is to be interpreted in 
the light of "reason, justice and truth"; and, to 
be efficient, the written, equally with the unwrit- 
ten, should be adjustable to the legitimate 
demands of society,* whether the particular 

* Wilson, Congr. Gov. : "Ours is, scarcely less than the British, 
a living and fecund system. It does not, indeed, find its rootage 
so widely in the hidden soil of unwritten law; its tap-root at 
least is the Constitution; but the Constitution is now, like Magna 
Charta and the Bill of Rights, only the sap-centre of a system of 
government vastly larger than the stock from which it has 
12 



178 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

matter in question was or was not contemplated 
in the original design. Formal prescriptions 
not thus eligible and responsive, though seem- 
ingly in force, are in reality a dead-letter as 
natural principles silently spring into operation 
in their stead. In other words, it is the unwrit- 
ten law — the jus naturale — constantly making 
and operating from beneath and from within, 
which in progressive society constitutes the real 
organic life of the State, and which goes before 
and shapes and reshapes the outward written 
formulas, breathing into these their only prac- 
tical force and vitality. Indeed, to quote the 
pointed words of Judge Hammond, "No truth 
can be clearer to the student of history and law 
than that a written constitution of any value 
always presupposes the existence of an unwrit- 
ten one; . . . the constitution as an objective 
fact must exist, before the constitution as an 
instrument of evidence can have any value. The 
worthlessness of written constitutions that have 
not unwritten ones beneath and behind them is 
one of the frequently recurring lessons of the 

branched, — a system some of whose forms have only very in- 
distinct and rudimental beginnings in the simple substance of 
the Constitution, and which exercises many functions apparently 
quite foreign to the primitive properties contained in the funda- 
mental law." Cf. Marshall, C. J., Wheaton, xii, 332. 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 179 

nineteenth century." * Formal revision or 
amendment is an expedient of frequent utility, 
but more so as a mode of law-declaring and law- 
defining than as a mode of law-making. But, 
usually speaking, in the practical conduct of 
government the processes of construction and 
interpretation, through the several organs of 
state, afford ample facility for bringing into 
proximate harmony the outward appearance of 
the law with the inward substance of the law. 
Thus the wonderful structure and genius of the 

* "What is a constitution, and what arc its objects? It is 
easier to tell what it is not than what it is. It is not the beginning 
of a community, nor the origin of private rights; it is not the 
fountain of law, nor the incipient state of government; it is not 
the cause, but the consequence, of personal and political freedom; 
it grants no rights to the people, but is the creature of their 
power, the instrument of their convenience. Designed for their 
protection in the enjoyment of the rights and powers which they 
possessed before the political government, and necessarily based 
upon the pre-existing condition of laws, rights, habits, and modes 
of thought. There is nothing primitive in it: It is all derived 
from a known source. It presupposes an organized society, law, 
order, property, personal freedom, a love of political liberty 
and enough of cultivated intelligence to know how to guard it 
against the encroachments of tyranny. A written constitution is 
in every instance a limitation upon the powers of government 
in the hands of agents; for there never was a written repub- 
lican constitution which delegated to functionaries all the latent 
powers which lie dormant in every nation, and are boundless in 
extent, and incapable of definition." 15 Mo. 13. See further 
Guizot, Hist. Rep. Gov. 427; also 30 Iowa, 45. 



180 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

Roman law was almost wholly evolved ; thus have 
we derived the elements of our common law ; and 
thus are legislative statutes made applicable to 
the facts of society. It was the discovery and 
utilization of this unwritten constitution "be- 
neath and behind" the written one that, under 
cover of "implied powers," furnished such a con- 
venient and "formidable weapon" in the hands 
of Hamilton and Chief Justice Marshall during 
the more nascent and tentative stages of the life 
of our Constitution. The ready, sagacious, 
almost intuitive, faculty displayed in the use of 
these constructive and modifying expedients in 
developing the latent powers of that instrument 
and in adapting these to the requirements of the 
national life, is the fact that lent to the fame of 
the great jurist its brightest lustre, and that called 
forth from Gen. Garfield that eloquent eulogy 
to his memory, — "He found the Constitution 
paper, and made it a power ; he found it a skele- 
ton, and clothed it in flesh and blood." Thus 
was the national polity placed upon a basis which 
rendered it entirely adaptable to the national life 
under all conditions and for all time. 

Citizenship and suffrage have been touched 
upon on a preceding page. Something more 
needs be said on the subject in this connection, as 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 181 

it presents several features which have a signifi- 
cance peculiar to this country. One of these 
features is the practice of appealing to racial and 
religious prepossessions, in order to gain party 
advantage. The pernicious character of such 
party tactics is readily apparent. Passions and 
prejudices are by this means aroused, which are 
palpably inimical to the letter and spirit of our 
Government. The framers of the Constitution, 
as we have seen, took an especial care to exclude 
questions of religion from the arena of our 
national politics; and this wise example all the 
States of the Union have followed. Homogeneity 
of sentiment, feeling, and aspiration among the 
people in national concerns is a desideratum yet 
even more greatly to be prized than such immun- 
ity from the complications of Church and State. 
Hence every agency or influence which tends to 
unsecularize the State or to keep alive alien 
memories, alien habits of thought, and alien man- 
ners and customs, and thus to retard, weaken, or 
arrest the process of assimilation, must be looked 
upon as prejudicial to the country's good. For 
this reason all such party nomenclature as "the 
Irish vote," "the German vote," "the Catholic 
vote," "the Protestant vote," and other like ill- 
conceived and un-American designations, which 



182 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

play such a conspicuous part in our "practical 
politics," is to be sincerely and earnestly dep- 
recated. And for the same reason, the teaching 
of alien tongues in our public schools, and the 
introduction and nurturing of societies or orders 
which have for their object the advancement of 
alien interests and alien ideas, must be held 
equally deserving of public reprobation. Prin- 
ciples and measures of government, together with 
the fitness of men proposed for the public service, 
and these things only, afford legitimate issues 
upon which the people may divide and take dis- 
tinctive party appellations. Race, nativity, or 
religious belief can have no rightful place in such 
concerns. "Is he American?" — this test satisfies 
the full measure of American citizenship. 

The negro as a political factor presents a 
problem by no means so easy of solution. Mr. 
Freeman, in his Impressions of the United 
States, well remarks that our complications from 
our unassimilated white population, some of 
which he comments upon, are "not likely to last 
forever." The Caucasian accretions from for- 
eign sources, after a generation or two, become 
completely absorbed and lost sight of in the 
native stock, and so cease to be subjects of 
separate or special national interest. Not so 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 183 

with the negro difficulty. This, the same writer 
maintains, "must last, either till the way has been 
found out by which the Ethiopian may change 
his skin, or till either the white man or the black 
departs out of the land. The United States — 
and, in their measure, other parts of the Ameri- 
can continent and islands — have to grapple with 
a problem such as no other people ever had to 
grapple with before. Other communities, from 
the beginning of political society, have been 
either avowedly or practically founded on dis- 
tinctions of race. There has been, to say the 
least, some people or nation or tribe which has 
given its character to the whole body, and by 
which other elements have been assimilated. In 
the United States this part has been played, as 
far as the white population is concerned, by the 
original English kernel. Round that kernel the 
foreign elements have grown ; it assimilates them ; 
they do not assimilate it. But beyond that 
range lies another range where assimilation ceases 
to be possible. The eternal laws of nature, the 
eternal distinction of color, forbid the assimila- 
tion of the negro. You may give him the rights 
of citizenship by law; you cannot make him the 
real equal, the real fellow, of citizens of Euro- 
pean descent. Never before in our world, the 



184 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

world of Rome, and all that Rome has influenced, 
has such an experiment been tried. And this, 
though in some ages of the Roman dominion the 
adoption and assimilation of men of other races 
was carried to the extremest point that the laws 
of nature would allow." 

The man that you cannot make "the real equal, 
the real fellow," of the Anglo-Saxon, you cannot 
make a "real" American citizen. You will lack 
that homogeneity of character, that intercourse, 
that compatibility of temper which are essential 
to a cohesive, symmetrical, well-balanced society. 
In the days of slavery it was urged that the 
nation could not "endure permanently, half slave 
and half free." All would become "one thing 
or the other." It is now maintained, perhaps 
with equal propriety, that the nation can not 
endure permanently, with a constituency part 
white and part black. Certain it is, at least, that 
the breach between the two races in every walk 
of life, public or private, is growing wider and 
wider day by day,* and from present appear- 
ances there is little prospect that the situation in 

* Tourgee's An Appeal to Caesar: "Every possible influence 
affecting each of the races tends toward separation and isolation. 
The black, as a man, is further away from the white than he was 
at the close of the war. The separateness of feeling, sentiment, 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 185 

this respect is ever to improve. These facts ex- 
plain, in part at least, why the blacks of the 
South, and to some less extent the blacks of the 
North, so largely hold their votes as merchan- 
dise to be sold to the highest bidder. Everywhere 
shut out, as they are, from the honors and emolu- 
ments of office, and from fellowship of every kind 
with the dominant race, they can take little real 
interest in the political concerns of the nation. 
The abolition of slavery did not, it thus appears, 
rid us of the old-time "irrepressible conflict" ; it 
only altered its form and direction; in which 
circumstance we have another striking exempli- 
fication of the utter futility of attempting by 
paper decrees to evade or abrogate the eternal 
laws of nature. 

The "distinction of color" is not the only dif- 
ficulty that bars the way of the negro to political 
recognition. The opinion is rapidly gaining 
ground among thinking and observing persons 
that he is "totally unfitted for self-government 
and incapable as a people of making any progress 

and interest is greater than it was upon the day that emancipa- 
tion took effect. This tendency toward a separate crystallization 
of interest, feeling, and action, as we have already demonstrated, 
must in all economic and social aspects grow stronger and more 
marked with each succeeding year." See also An Appeal to 
Pharoah, and Senator J. J. Ingalls, Cong. Rec, Jan. 24, 1890. 



186 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

whatever." * We know that in his aboriginal 
home he has never advanced beyond the lower 
stages of savagery. In the New World, with 
the example of the whites before him, he has, 
indeed, made more or less progress; but as such 
advantages are withdrawn the original barbarous 
African nature tends unmistakably to reassert 
itself. This tendency in greater or less degree is 
observable among the black of our Southern 
States. It appears most lamentably conspicuous, 
however, in Hayti, the model Black Republic, 
where more than anywhere else outside of his 
native African jungles, the negro has been left 
free to carve out an independent destiny for him- 
self. Here his failure stands out as humiliating 
as it is palpable. Through the enterprise and 
fostering care of the European there grew up in 
this island — so history tells us — perhaps the 
wealthiest and most prosperous colonial province 
in the world; but with the advent of negro rule 
(1804) there set in an era of general decadence, 

* Lamentable and startling proof to this effect is given in Sir 
Spencer St. John's Hayti or The Black Republic and in Froude's 
The English in the West Indies. The author of the one was the 
resident British minister in Hayti for many years, and the author 
of the other made a personal visit to the West Indies a few years 
ago specially to study British interests in that quarter. Both 
were, therefore, fully qualified witnesses in the premises. 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 187 

which ever since has been growing from bad to 
worse until civilization has well-nigh fled the 
land. Even Voudouism, with its horrid rites 
of child-sacrifice and cannibalism, has fast reap- 
peared, and is now so rampant as more or less to 
dominate and poison the whole society. 

The Mongolian race is perhaps a little less 
objectionable than the African because ethnically 
a little less remote from the Caucasian. But 
the Mongolian, unlike the African, is denied the 
privileges of our citizenship. Besides, those of 
the former race now among us do not propagate 
their kind, while reinforcement bjr immigration 
in their case is by law strictly inhibited. So if 
these conditions continue, embarrassments from 
this source will gradually — indeed rapidly — 
disappear. That the restrictions and inhibitions 
imposed upon the yellow man should be kept up 
and rigorously enforced is, however, a duty 
palpably manifest, from the fact that he, no less 
than the black man, appears wholly unfitted for 
our progressive civilization. The first has stood 
stone-still in the world's history for more than 
two thousand years, while the second has of him- 
self never been able to get beyond his breech- 
clout, his snake-worship, and his man-eating. 
As is pointed out in a recent work of wide and 



188 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

intelligent research, we are compelled to accept 
the fact "that all the savage tribes of the earth be- 
long to the Negro or the Mongolian race. No 
Negro civilization has ever appeared. No Mon- 
golian one has ever greatly developed. On the 
other hand, the Caucasian is pre-eminently the 
man of civilization. No traveller or historian 
records a savage tribe of Caucasian stock. This 
race everywhere enters history in a state of ad- 
vanced barbarism or of rapidly advancing civiliza- 
tion." * As to the type of race which has proved 
itself capable of sustained progress, the same 
author advances the following plausible theory: 
The practical faculty is a characteristic of the fair 
whites of the North, and the imaginative faculty 
a characteristic of the dark whites of the South. 
"It is to the mingling of South and North, of 
fair and dark, of judgment and emotion, of 

* The latest and most plausible theory of ethnical classification 
is that of "racial color." It is thus stated by Hon. C. H. Reeve 
in The South Bend Times, Sept. 27, 1889: "If the color of the 
skin and hair and eyes is fixed, single, unchanging, so is the 
brain power. If the color is variable, complex and changeable, 
so is the brain power. The less changeable, the less brain power. 
The more variable, the more brain power. . . . The Indian 
has more power than the Negro. The Maylayan more power than 
the Indian. The Chinese more power than either. The white race 
alone has the power of steady continued progress. It alone has 
the variableness in color of skin, hair, eyes, and the texture that 
indicates the highest brain power." 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 189 

imagination and reason, that we owe . . . the 
apex of human development, and the culminat- 
ing point in the long-continued evolution of 
man." This blending of qualities is found to be 
the most perfect in the Anglo-Saxon, and to this 
race therefore is awarded pre-eminence in the 
faculty for progress. 

Admitting, then, that we have in this race- 
problem a serious difficulty on our hands, what 
remedy if any have we to propose? The negro 
is by constitutional provision made the equal of 
the white man before the law and at the ballot- 
box. How are we to maintain the high standard 
of our institutions with such an alleged inferior 
element having equal voice in their direction? 
We may answer that no exact prescription can 
be laid down to fit the whole case. A recogni- 
tion of first principles, however, is a start in 
the right direction. The preservation of public 
order is the primary consideration to be looked to 
in the premises. This can be done only through 
the recognition of the virtue and intelligence of 
the community as the ruling power of the State.* 

* "To say that the superior race shall not by its superior knowl- 
edge and virtue rule the inferior, is to say that weakness shall 
control strength, that ignorance and vice shall control knowledge 
and virtue. To attempt by legislation to place ignorance and vice 



190 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

Especially should this be so, where, as in the 
present case the lines of cleavage in the electoral 
constituency are horizontal and not vertical. 
Upon no other principle can our civilization be 
perpetuated and republican liberty be preserved. 
After recognizing this principle as fundamental, 
we may hope that the factors in the problem will 
tend to solve themselves. Tentative measures 
conceived in the spirit of "reason, justice and 
truth" will find out the way. Meantime the 
better policy to pursue would appear to be to 
relegate the problem for adjustment to the com- 
munities most interested, where the people are 
best acquainted with its conditions, and therefore 
best qualified to find the proper solution, and 
where the workings of any measures looking to 
such solution can be the better observed; the 
nation at the same time seeing to it that the 
constitutional guarantee of a "republican form 
of government" "in every state" shall be sacredly 

in control of knowledge and virtue because of the superior num- 
bers of the ignorant, would be to enact that the civilization of 
great races shall not enjoy the power and influence with which 
God has endowed them; that three weak men, however ignorant 
and debased, shall forever control two whites, however wise and 
virtuous. The mere statement of the proposition shows that it is 
hostile to the highest natural and moral laws which have been 
impressed upon man and constitute the basis of his civilization." — 
Senator Z. B. Vance, Cong. Bee, Jan. 31, 1890. 



FEATURES OF AMERICAN POLITY 191 

maintained. The method prescribed may not 
in a certain sense appear strictly to comport with 
such guarantee. Not to recognize the right of 
an ignorant, incompetent, distrusted majority to 
rule may be seemingly anti-republican; but it is 
surely not more so in spirit than was the policy 
that would force the people of a State back into 
the Union, after such people had unquestionably 
determined to go out. In either case the well- 
being of the society is the ultimate issue involved, 
and certainly no one at this day will deny that 
the power of self-preservation is in every such 
event the all-paramount end to be considered. 
In applying the method presented to the problem 
in hand, no exercise of violence — no "shot-gun" 
policy — need be contemplated. It is but 
nature's law that the morally and intellectually 
strong guide the morally and intellectually weak, 
however great the disparity between them 
physically.* It is so as between man and the 

* The holding of the Pan-American Congress is a significant 
straw indicating the general drifting of the current in this direc- 
tion. The utterances at the last banquet of the American Bar 
Association as reported in the Chicago Inter-Ocean of August 31, 
1889, show the sentiment and spirit of the Bar upon the same 
point, as reflected by the subjoined remarks of Judge Cooley on 
that occasion: "While order has been gradually strengthening 
and perfecting under a regular administration of law in every 
country of Christendom, something like a code of laws for the 



192 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

brute; it is so as between man and man. In the 
absence of extraneous irritating causes, there- 
fore, we may reasonably hope that the complica- 
tions we have been considering will in time 
gradually and peacefully reach a fair and ac- 
ceptable adjustment. 

determination of international questions has been coming into 
existence. It has come to be perceived that the rules of right 
and justice that are applicable to individuals are equally applic- 
able to the aggregations of individuals which we know as nations; 
and usages have grown up and treaties been entered into which 
have determined under an infinite variety of circumstances how 
these rules shall be applied in preserving the peace of the world. 
Whether a code shall not be agreed upon and promulgated by 
the common consent of nations is now one of the living questions 
of the day, and it seems not improbable that in the near future 
there will be such a code, as comprehensive for all practical pur- 
poses as those which are established for municipal government." 



THE ANGLO-SAXON AND MANIFEST 
DESTINY 



13 



XI. 

THE ANGLO-SAXON AND MANIFEST DESTINY. 

\\/E have referred to the rapid spread of the 
white man over the globe, and to the leader- 
ship and increasing dominance of the Anglo- 
Saxon in the race for universal empire. It 
remains to inquire what part the American 
Republic is destined to play in this mighty drama 
of the nations. Mr. Froude has helped us in 
some degree to give answer to this query. After 
much special study of the problem and extensive 
personal observation, he has asserted it as his 
deliberate conviction "that the English-speaking 
people will drift into a union of some kind. If 
they do not choose England as their centre, they 
will eventually choose America." This distin- 
guished historian and publicist is by no means a 
democratic enthusiast; rather the very reverse; 
but the significant signs of the times have forced 
him to this conclusion. Nor is he alone in this 
belief. The subject has of late evoked much 
learned discussion on both sides of the Atlantic. 
But in the American view, and in the view ap- 
parently of the logic of events, if such "union" 

[195] 



196 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

is to take place "it is America which has set the 
example and indicated the method." Several 
suggestive facts may be adduced which would 
seem amply to warrant the assertion of such 
claim. 

In the first place, it is plain that the British 
colonies are in no temper to submit to any scheme 
of "union" which may savor at all of monarchy. 
Being practically democratic and self-governing, 
made up chiefly of the great middle class, free 
from hereditary castes, and instinctively repug- 
nant to the transplanting of such obnoxious 
exotics among them, they offer a congenial and 
prolific soil for the growth and spread of republi- 
can principles and institutions. Thus are they 
all the while growing away from the parent 
country. Every scheme yet proposed for les- 
sening the breach and strengthening the ties of 
nationality has met with insuperable objection. 
It is plainly seen that the centrifugal forces now 
at work are bound sooner or later to snap asunder 
the last remaining cord that binds the parent 
and offspring together. In the present instance, 
the circumstances tending towards such result 
are decidedly stronger and the inducements far 
greater than were the influences which led to the 
great revolt in America a century and more ago. 



THE ANGLO-SAXON AND DESTINY 197 

The Stamp-Act was seized upon as the occasion 
for the severing of our allegiance from the 
mother country, and it may take a less pretext in 
the present case to set the ball rolling. When 
the crisis does come, as to all appearances come it 
must, it is "at least possible" — says the same 
authority speaking as an Englishman from an 
English point of view — that the disaffected com- 
munities "may apply for admittance to the 
American Union; and it is equally possible that 
the Americans may not refuse. Canada they 
(the Americans) already calculate on as a cer- 
tainty. Why may not the Cape and Australia 
and New Zealand follow? The American citi- 
zen is a more considerable person in the world 
than a member of the independent republic of 
Cape Town or Natal; and should the colonists 
take this view of their interests, and should 
the Americans encourage them, what kind of fu- 
ture would lie before England? Our very exist- 
ence as a nation would soon depend upon the 
clemency of the Power which would have finally 
taken the lead from us among the English- 
speaking races. If Australia and the Cape were 
American we could not hold India, except at the 
Americans' pleasure. Our commerce would be 
equally at their mercy, and the best prospects 



,198 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

for us would be to be one day swept up into the 
train of the same grand confederacy." True, 
these utterances were written about two decades 
ago, but the author repeats substantially the 
same views in his Oceana, which work was issued 
but five years since (in 1885), after he had made 
the tour round the world, visiting en route all the 
principal colonies. The drift of sentiment in 
the colonies is at present undoubtedly toward 
independence. In Canada the project of an- 
nexation to the United States has gained some 
foot-hold; but the route to such consummation 
is much more likely to lie through the inter- 
mediate station of independence. What more 
natural and matter-of-fact in such event than 
that the peoples which are so closely allied to us 
in all the elements that make up a homogeneous 
nationality should, especially under pressure of 
the present tendency to large political aggre- 
gations, seek to cast their fortunes with the 
American Union — that nation which, according 
to Mr. Froude has "solved, and solved com- 
pletely," "the problem of how to combine a 
number of self-governing communities into a 
single commonwealth?" 

At the same time that we are watching this 
leaven of democracy thus working out its results 



THE ANGLO-SAXON AND DESTINY 199 

among the Anglo-Saxon peoples wherever 
located, we cannot fail to notice that other 
branches of Indo-Europeans are gradually but 
steadily yielding to the same softening and 
liberalizing influences. The Latin and Teu- 
tonic states of Europe are unmistakably drifting 
in this direction, and even Slavonic Russia, 
deeply-dyed in despotism as she is, is showing 
increasing symptoms of a like leaven working 
at her core. It can be only a question of time 
when she too must give way to the increasing 
pressure of advancing civilization. For after 
all, is not her dominant race, the Slav, bone of 
our bone and flesh of our flesh? Thus will all 
the non-Asiatic branches of the ancient Aryan 
family again be brought together upon a com- 
mon plane and fitted to pursue a common 
destiny. 

Another reason presents itself why the United 
States may claim the leadership of the English 
speaking races. Says Dr. Strong in his power- 
ful essay on The Anglo-Saxon and the World's 
Future: "There can be no reasonable doubt that 
North America is to be the great home of the 
Anglo-Saxon, the principal seat of his power, 
the center of his life and influence. Not 
only does it constitute seven-elevenths of his 



200 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

possessions, but his empire is unsevered, while the 
remaining four-elevenths are fragmentary and 
scattered over the earth. Australia will have a 
great population; but its disadvantages, as com- 
pared with North America, are too manifest to 
need mention. Our continent has room and 
resources and climate, it lies in the pathway of 
the nations, it belongs to the zone of power, and 
already, among Anglo-Saxons, do we lead in 
population and wealth." Though a part of the 
great Anglo-Saxon family, we yet have evolved 
a distinctive type of individuality — a type 
strong, energetic, self assertive; one which 
readily impresses itself upon all kindred ethnic 
elements with which it comes in contact. Thus, 
with the help of such assimilating accretions 
from abroad, our population, as the same writer 
shows, has doubled since the beginning of the last 
century, on the average, once in every twenty- 
five years. Our increase in territory has even 
more than kept pace with our increase in popula- 
tion ; so that to-day, with a national domain well- 
nigh as large as the entire continent of Europe, 
we comprise (to borrow the words of Sir Henry 
Maine) "the most multitudinous and homoge- 
neous population in the world." But our unoccu- 
pied lands are rapidly filling up, and when 



THE ANGLO-SAXON AND DESTINY 201 

pressure from this cause begins to be felt, it is 
hardly probable that Yankee genius and Yankee 
grit would be content long to remain cooped up 
within the country's present metes and bounds. 
More probable is it, that the restive, indomitable 
Yankee spirit which has thus carried the nation 
forward in its phenomenal career, is destined to 
move onward in its imposing majesty in what- 
ever direction and to whatever extent new fields 
for enterprise and achievement shall invite occu- 
pancy and development. The Yankee flag will 
inevitably follow Yankee destiny. In a word, 
it is only when the American plan — the plan of 
a federal republic — shall have become world- 
embracing that the cherished dreams of "mani- 
fest destiny" will have become fully realized. 
The natural forces of material and intellectual 
evolution are gradually, silently, surely tending 
to that end. The tendency of society to indus- 
trial, social and political co-operation, and of 
industrial and intellectual development to the 
growth of popular ideas and institutions, are 
among the healthful, hopeful signs pointing in 
the direction indicated. 

Montesquieu, whose politico - philosophical 
speculations profoundly influenced the liberal 
thought of the latter part of the last (18th) 



202 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

century, laid down the doctrine that republican 
government was practicable only as applied to 
small communities. But the framers of our 
Federal Constitution thought otherwise, as did 
the keen, clear-sighted writers in The Federalist. 
Federation united with representation and local 
self-government was conceived by the founders 
of our Government as embodying the true polity 
for such a people as ours, and experience thus 
far has certainly amply demonstrated their 
sagacity in so doing. With our forty-two States 
and sixty millions of people, the nation is 
working under this triune system in all its parts 
and in all its relations with the minimum of 
friction perhaps possible under present condi- 
tions in organized society. The conviction, too, 
is becoming more and more current, that, if the 
optimistic dream of the "brotherhood of man" 
is ever to be realized politically in the birth of a 
universal nation, this same triune principle em- 
braces in itself all the conditions requisite to the 
successful working out of such destiny. Nor is 
such an ambitious conception to be pooh-poohed 
as an empty chimera. Obviously, the thoughts 
of men are widening with the process of the suns. 
The rapid increase of the means of intercourse 
among nations is necessarily tending to bring 



THE ANGLO-SAXON AND DESTINY 203 

about the result indicated. Our interests and our 
habits of thought, under such stimulus, are fast 
becoming more enlarged, more cosmopolitan. 
We are already drawing upon the four quarters 
of the globe in order to satisfy our multiplying 
tastes, necessities, and desires. Under such 
circumstances, it is impossible that a community 
of feeling, sentiment, and method should not 
spring up. Accordingly, we note that broader 
and more enlightened views of international law 
and comity are steadily developing. Commis- 
sions and arbitration as methods of adjusting 
international entanglements are growing more 
and more in general favor and acceptance. And 
as such tendency toward social and material 
homogeneity increases, the range of jurisdiction 
of such international tribunals would naturally 
undergo a corresponding augmentation, and 
would as a consequence eventually develop into a 
permanent "court of envoys," or the so-called 
"parliament of man." There seems, indeed, to 
be little room for doubt that this liberal, cosmo- 
politan spirit will become stronger and stronger 
as its advantages become more and more clearly 
discerned, till some day disputes among nations, 
as disputes now among the several States of 
our Union and among individuals, will come 



204 THE AMERICAN IDEA 

universally to be "settled by legal argument and 
judicial decision, and not by wager of battle." 
Professor Fiske, in his admirable lecture on 
"Manifest Destiny," has told us in clearest, 
tersest phrase how this desideratum is logically 
to come about. "The history of human progress 
politically will," in his view, "continue to be in 
the future what it has been in the past, — the 
history of the union of successive groups of men 
into larger and more complex aggregates. As 
this process goes on, it may after many more 
ages of political experience become apparent 
that there is really no reason, in the nature of 
things, why the whole of mankind should not 
constitute politically one huge federation, each 
little group managing its local affairs in entire 
independence, but relegating all questions of 
international interest to the decision of one 
central tribunal supported by the public opinion 
of the entire human race." Thus "The American 
Idea," which we have been trying throughout 
these pages in some measure to illustrate, will 
have become expanded and ripened so as to 
embrace all humanity within its scope, and 
thenceforth to help carry forward the interests 
of civilization so far as political agency can be 
made to contribute to such end. We conclude, 



THE ANGLO-SAXON AND DESTINY 205 

therefore, that viewing our lot in the light of 
universal history, we of this Republic have little 
reasonable ground to complain of our country, 
our age, or the prospects which appear to lie 
before us. 

THE END. 



